Fluid dynamics

Painter Gerri Rachins on creating "Getting from One Place to Another."

Gerri Rachins, “Getting from One Place to Another,” 2023, Flashe, acrylic ink, Arches Aquarelle paper, 45 ½ x 30 inches. Photo Julia Featheringill

Painter Gerri Rachins shows me a selection of the works she has put together for “Getting from One Place to Another,” a solo exhibition organized by Barbara O’Brien and coming to New York’s Painting Center in March.

First I register the colors. Gerri is a captive of color and a master of it. In the title piece for “Getting From One Place to Another,” which she writes about here, hushed blues and violets enfold pulsing tones of school-bus yellow and a red ochre. Greens drip, puddle.

It’s those greens that pull my eye next to the shapes: spindly tentacles make boundaries. Forms butt up against each other; are they discrete? Or are they compound? I’m inclined to see two blue and yellow composites bumping snouts against the reddish brown and deeper blue ground; following line and informed by color, my eye carves out a sense of space.

Then Gerri shows me a process video (you can watch it below). She’s pouring and dripping paint, then lifting her paper by the edges and moving it around. It’s windy out, and she exposes the wet paint to the elements. It’s a dance in which artist, paint, and weather have equal play; she leads, then she follows. My gaze turns from the video to her paintings on the wall, and all I see is movement – alive, unpredictable – push-pulls and unexpected detours.

Gerri finds her titles in Tuesday’s science section of the New York Times. The language of science is an open container for the tensions in her work, which seem as much about action as object, as much about question as answer. They are not about here or there – they’re about that tenuous, confusing place in between.

Gerri writes: