At noon, daylight pours through the skylight of Brooklyn’s Carvalho Park, illuminating Rosalind Tallmadge’s 12-by-8.5-foot installation Light Field (2024). Fashioned from delicate Japanese organza and finished with silvered mica that metallicizes the material through a specialized mirroring process, the work cascades from the ceiling as if it were sunlight itself, flooding into the gallery. The hanging installation spans from the ceiling to the floor, the fleshy silk draping from the bottom onto the floor.
This work is the focal point of the Brooklyn-based artist’s debut solo exhibition at Carvalho Park, “AETHER,” on view until May 4th. Its luminosity suggests a gateway to the heavens, yet the celestial installation is made of completely terrestrial materials. “There’s this real material tension between heaviness and solidity and fragility in the work—the pieces look very ethereal and ephemeral, but they’re very solid and hard,” Tallmadge told Artsy, standing under the skylight. In her stunning four cracked wall works made from selenite crystals, three fractured, silvery mica paintings, and the central installation, Tallmadge explores the relationship between light and the human body, for her, a metaphor for heaven and Earth.
During her MFA program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the 2010s, Tallmadge began to introduce decorative and cosmetic materials in her abstract works to evoke the female body. There, she experimented with mica, metal leaf, and sequin fabrics, adding a human element to her work. Today, this tendency to experiment with materials has developed into boundary-pushing sculptural processes that incorporate raw materials, such as metals, minerals, and silk.
In 2017, Tallmadge first connected with Jennifer Carvalho, director and co-founder of Carvalho Park, after being introduced to each other by another artist Carvalho was working with in New York. Soon after, Carvalho and gallery co-founder Se Yoon Park invited Tallmadge to set up her studio in a back room at the East Williamsburg gallery, where she worked until 2020. During this time, Tallmadge became intimately acquainted with the gallery’s specific characteristics—the space, the staff, and most importantly, the light emanating from the skylight and the front garage door, which ended up inspiring the current work on view.
Adjacent to Light Field is Tallmadge’s trio of mica paintings, where silk is stretched across large frames and mica is applied on top. These flaky, fractured canvases then undergo the same “mirroring” process as Light Field, where the mica is coated in a thin layer of reflective silver. This mirroring also oxidizes the surface, causing color changes in the golden patina, seen most dramatically in the center of Sonambulo II (2024). It captures and reflects the room’s light, and, as viewers approach, the works mirror their reflection across the broken surfaces.
“There’s definitely this throughline of a nod to the human body,” Tallmadge said. The images appear trapped, encased in a broken looking glass, creating ever-shifting reflections as long as there’s light in the room. “With the reflective nature of the mirrored pieces, the viewer has to physically be present to engage in the pieces. They’re anti-image; there’s something quixotic about making a static object that’s also not static,” she added. These canvases seem volatile, rendering a sublime sense of self-perception for the viewer rather than capturing a single image.
Elsewhere, Tallmadge evokes the body through the beige- and pink-toned fabric stretched over a glass frame, with cut selenite crystals stuck over the top to give a shattered effect. For the artist, these fractured works symbolize vague imprints, where the body is distantly revealed behind the surface.
“The selenite works are hand-cut, so each piece is a stone that I cut slivers off and then place like a puzzle onto the silk fabric,” Tallmadge said. “It’s a very intense process based in an almost ritualistic sense. But then there’s so much variety in how they turn out. It’s completely organic.”
Selenite, silver, mica, silk: These natural materials allow Tallmadge to tether her work to something tangible. Yet the artist’s approach to her work resembles that of an alchemist, searching for sublime truths by experimenting with raw, earthy materials. In these bold experiments at the intersection of painting and sculpture, Tallmadge succeeds where the alchemists could not—gesturing to the sublime in these terrestrial materials.
