Gabrielle Shirek - "The Expanse"

Gabrielle Shirek is a Miami, FL based artist who feels most at home in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Her work is inspired by time spent in the wilderness, where the expansive natural world meets the infinite night sky. These pieces are explorations of color from its most saturated form to the pigment that is revealed as light is brought in. Through the contrasting of dark and light, she aims to momentarily reproduce the sentiment of cosmic insignificance that comes from overlooking a canyon and seeing the night sky meld into the earth. With acrylic paints, gel mediums, and brushwork, she creates textured color gradients on paper. By hand cutting and reconstructing these gradients, she builds abstract cosmic topographic maps. Her paper “Spacescapes” are built intuitively through an assemblage of smaller pieces making up the topography of the greater celestial region which, unfolding organically, is only revealed once complete.

www.gabrielleshirek.com