BIO
GELAH PENN was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. After receiving her BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973, she settled in New York City. Penn has exhibited her work widely in solo and group exhibitions, including the National Academy Museum, Sculpture Center, Smack Mellon, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Brattleboro
Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Baker Center for the Arts/Muhlenberg College, Amelie A. Wallace Gallery/SUNY Old Westbury, and Bibliothèque Nationale Municipale, among others. A major site-responsive installation will be included in the group exhibition “The Gravity of LIght” at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Fall, 2026.
Penn's work is in the collections of the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Arkansas Arts Center, Columbus Museum, Brooklyn Museum Library, and Cleveland Institute of Art/Gund Library. She has received a Connecticut Artist Fellowship, a Tree of Life Individual Artist Grant, and residencies from the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Reviews of Penn's work have been published inThe New York Times, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, dArt International, and Whitehot Magazine, and featured in Sculpture Magazine, Art Maze Mag, and Peripheral Vision Press.
After many years in New York City, the artist now lives and works in rural northwest Connecticut.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work expands the language of drawing in sculptural space. The permeability and cross-pollination between these disciplines continue to energize me. Deploying lightweight synthetic materials in constructed wall pieces and site-responsive installations, I foreground conceptual and formal dualities: substance and immateriality, cohesion and fragmentation, object and image. By cutting, layering, stapling, and stretching polyester
mesh, plastic bags, Mylar, and mosquito netting within a piece or throughout a site, I examine the nature of shadow, light, and visual ambiguity. My aim is to choreograph events of perceptual incident and psychological unease.
As an undergraduate at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1970s, I was privileged to see Jay de Feo’s “The Rose” several times a day as I moved from class to studio. I was struck by the intensity of this great sculptural wall piece, and its quiet, yet electrifying presence. I was studying painting, but it was likely the first moment I understood that materiality could amplify the overlapping power of mediums in one work. It was some years after I moved to New York City that I became comfortable in these interstices, and de Feo’s masterwork was a major factor in propelling me in that direction.
In 1980/81, I worked at Dia Art Foundation In New York City, where I met Fred Sandback, James Turrell and other significant contemporary artists who inspired a deeper investigation of materials and methods in my own work. My interest soon prompted me to incorporate fishing line and synthetic hair in my paintings. After a time, I veered toward using objects, both built and found, as armatures for my increasingly sculptural pieces. But eventually I realized that the wall was the best support and collaborator for my work, and that manipulating layers of lightweight industrial materials there provided the translucency, transformation, and materiality that was most satisfying for me.
My fascination with cinema, particularly film noir, has long informed my work. I’m interested in the kind of affect that presents itself in noir: that mystery and anxiety in which certainty is always ambiguous. It’s part of what I’m forever trying to get at--layers, marks, and shadows prodding allusions ranging from the theatrical to the forensic to the comedic.
Since 2022, I have been focusing on the monumental, totemic wall pieces of my Phantom series. A nuanced dialogue between gravity and instability animates these works. I construct them with materials chosen for their malleability as well as their capacity to activate light. Shapes, gestures, and marks hover between veils of silkscreen mesh to function as dreamlike semaphores. Their scale and verticality allude to the commemorative stone stelae found in antiquity, evoking an oblique, imposing figural presence. GP 2026