PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

William Steiger: dreamland

October 28 - December 3, 2005
Opening Reception: Friday, October 28, 7 to 10 pm
Castleberry Hill Arts in the Afternoon: Saturday, October 29, 2 to 5 pm

Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to present dreamland, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by William Steiger. This will be the New York based artist’s fourth solo exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery.

Dreamland was the name of one of the original three great parks of Coney Island. In William Steiger’s art, dreamland describes a place where, like a dream, some memories may be recalled and described in exquisite detail yet other information is forgotten, lost, or obscured - like the edges of an overexposed old black & white photograph. The intricate web of a Ferris wheel, an aerial tramway gliding along a delicate cable, landscapes as imagined from the perspective of an airplane, and stark yet colorful rural architecture all feel familiar and entirely fresh at the same time. Drawing from observation, memory, and imagination, Steiger is inspired, in part, by the early 20th century, including, of course, Coney Island. His sublime spaces have a tension that is often created more by what is omitted than by what is left in.

While Steiger's work has grown increasingly more reductive and abstract, the seemingly simpler compositions ultimately communicate more through their sparing directness. In his recent work, the subjects have become more colorful, while the backgrounds have become a more brilliant white. This whiteness may represent the land, or a surface, or sky, or water ... or all of these simultaneously within a single painting as the resulting forms rise from, and meld into, the landscape in which they appear.

A graduate of Yale University (1989), William Steiger is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, and is the subject of over thirty articles and essays. His work is exhibited extensively internationally, and is in such collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, MOMA, the Pfizer Corporation, Microsoft and the Savannah College of Art, among many others.