Lisa Golightly: Becoming the Sea

Billis/Williams Gallery is pleased to present LISA GOLIGHTLY: BECOMING THE SEA, the gallery’s fifth solo exhibition of paintings by the Portland, Oregon-based artist. The exhibition features the artist’s gestural figurative paintings based on found vintage photographs and includes a monumental new work among the largest the artist has created to date. The show opens with a reception on June 13th and continues through July 11th.

Lisa Golightly’s paintings are rooted in the concept of capturing memories. She begins the process of a new show by searching for old photographs in thrift stores and estate sales. Sorting through the abandoned records of other people’s lives provides her with unique insight into other’s personal histories. There is a nostalgia to the imagery - and yet it is not personal to the artist. She is an impartial viewer - immortalizing in paint something someone else deemed special enough to capture on film during a time before the current moment of endless digital photographs stored unseen on our devices.

Golightly’s gestural painting technique creates a surface marked by flowing motion. She works in a high gloss enamel on aluminum which gives the paintings a lustrous finish that nods to their photographic source material. The color palette is reduced, the forms pared down to their essential shapes, and the textures she is able to achieve are nuanced and elegant. Golightly’s absence of detail allows her subjects to resonate on a universal level - it is as if the viewer is looking at memories buried deep in time that could be their own.

Lisa Golightly’s paintings are a nod to the past as viewed through a contemporary eye. Memory is in constant motion: changing, evolving or disappearing. While Golightly’s work often contains a sense of stillness and quiet, the paintings exist on the edge of reality and acknowledge the elusiveness and subjectivity of human memory. Exploring the intersection of the original photograph and the personal histories of the viewer, these paintings ultimately speak to how unstable and easily altered photographs and memory are - both of which we so heavily rely on and yet are never as concrete as they might seem.

Lisa Golightly (b. 1974, Eugene, Oregon) received her BFA in 1996 from the University of Arizona in Fine Art Photography and Photojournalism. She has had numerous solo exhibitions including at Billis/Williams Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Linda Hodges Gallery (Seattle, WA), Clove and Creek (Kingston, NY), and Good Eye Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Her work has been reviewed in Ppaper Magazine, Luxe Interior and Designs, The Huffington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Her work has been featured in art fairs throughout the United States and was selected for a promotional campaign in London, England in celebration of International Women's Day. She was also chosen to produce an album cover and interior art for musician Alec Lytle. Golightly lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where she spends her days in the old carriage garage-turned-studio in the back yard of her 100-year-old home.