Sally Warren: The Press of My Hands

May 18 - August 3

The Press of My Hands

Liliana Bloch Gallery is proud to present a new exhibition by Sally Warren, entitled The Press of My Hands. The artist focuses her digital printmaking practice on material transformation, using a newly developed inkjet transfer process that employs her hands for mark-making and pressure. Triggered by the denied losses of the COVID-19 period, the work refers to the virtuality and transience of contemporary shared experience.

Warren often appropriates online images as her primary source. For this series, she drew from collected documentary photographs of cities ravaged by war or natural disaster. From the safety of a laptop, these images of distant catastrophes may seem remote and unreal, yet they describe histories that victims must live with. For the news consumer, such distressing events fade quickly into the past, continually replaced by fresh disasters.

Wanting to validate a reality, and perhaps to mourn, the artist turned to these archived records of unfelt losses. Each selected image was considered at length. Its coherence as a news photograph had to be opened up to new interpretations. Looking for a metaphoric bridge between virtual and material, the artist developed a new process to transfer digital images to paper by hand.

The press of her hands, smoothing paper over ink to transfer the image, became a gesture of affirmation. The simple act of materializing what was unfelt provided the bridge the artist had sought. Each finished print is a site of invested meaning and an embodied response to virtual experience.

Sally Warren received her MFA from Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas and her BA from The University of Texas at Austin. She has shown at Liliana Bloch Gallery, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, the Dallas Contemporary, Brookhaven College, Mountainview College, the Free Museum of Dallas, Tarrant County College, Mercedes Benz Financial Services, SMU Pollock Gallery, and Northwind Gallery in Port Townsend, WA.