Opening Reception of 'Moon Bloom,' a Solo Exhibition featuring Sabrina Piersol

Moon Bloom

Sabrina Piersol
March 29th - May 3rd, 2025

Opening Reception: Wednesday April 6th from 6:00 - 8:30pm

Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce Moon Bloom, an exhibition of the latest work by Sabrina Piersol. Works by Piersol will also be exhibited in the booth presentation at the Dallas Art Fair, April 10–13, 2025.

An essay accompanies the solo exhibition:

“In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilight turns long and blue ...[Y]ou find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades ...” – writer Joan Didion (Blue Nights, 2012)

Sabrina Piersol’s recent residency in the desert vistas of Pioneertown, CA turned into an extended (and intensified) chapter in her exploration of the color blue. The hue has become a predominant aesthetic obsession despite its slipperiness. It is interesting that the quest for color occurs at a transitional time: the artist turned 30 as she finished the work for the exhibition, Moon Bloom. At this juncture, Piersol finds herself bent on apprehending something fleeting. She and Didion attempt the same feat, to capture the ineffable that resides within the entirely phenomenological.

Last fall, prior to the desert residency, Piersol undertook a week-long silent meditation retreat in Colorado, when the foliage spread a yellow blanket over the entire landscape. With these combined image-memories burned into her mind, as a formal painter, Piersol let the relationship between rhythm, movement, and color take primacy. If she is a sister to Joan Didion, she belongs in a sisterhood with Georgia O’Keefe, too: landscape elements take on dreamlike, emotional, almost symbolic qualities. Forms in these vistas live in fluidity, in eddies of color. Piersol’s universe teems with flowers layered over earth—dunes or hills or folds of canyon—or sky. The terrain includes the soft shapes of undulating rocks and sparse flora. It is fertile, alive.

Ultimately, Piersol reveals to us that the true, “correct” desert blue she sought was an amalgamation of local colors—the lemon yellows, sagey greens, charcoal grays, warm browns that juxtaposed pale pinks, brilliant cadmium red. While the medium is oil paint rather than soft pastel, I see her in camaraderie with the French Symbolist Odilon Redon: the same mesmerizing balance of warm and cool tones. And while movement in the paintings embodies forces—energy and emotion—it is these luminous, almost evanescent colors, nevertheless rich in saturation, that make the canvases so generous and generative.

The title Moon Bloom, with its double “o’s,” represents in many ways the yoking of two recent experiences: residency and retreat, immersive focus and epiphany. The Pioneertown desert and the Rocky Mountains come together to create a similar emotional environment. She pulls from both, visually and psychologically, to create new landscapes.

There is also something lunar and crepuscular about Piersol’s work. She is a moon worshipper, she admits. The full moon, the glowing orb that is a hallmark of her paintings, is ethereal and yet grounds the composition. Metaphorically, it marks a transition zone: it belongs to the realm of blossoms that bloom at night, under the moon’s tutelage. It rules over moments of twilight, when the energy feels full of potential and also fleeting.

Such twilight spaces invite a “leaning in.” This “leaning in” is also characteristic of the Sapphic poetry that Piersol studied as a classics double major. She adores this lyrical Greek oeuvre that survives in fragments, its spaces of absence becoming gaps into which readers—like viewers— project. They are zones into which one might bring creation or simply accept the space between implicit and explicit. How is this different from the awe we might feel at her effort and ease: the effort to bring two entities together; the ease with which it is done? Ultimately, she makes space for the seemingly paradoxical. What she calls “gorgeous silent wonder.”

- Eve Hill-Agnus