Mira Dancy

The series focuses on three faces in close-up. Repeating bits of sky, traces of light, and earthly shadows cut into and out of the compositions, overlapping, complicating, and competing with facial elements. The faces have just one eye open as they exchange glances to form a small chorus – or a litany – of eyewitness accounts. Like many of the artist’s recent works, these etchings have an ecological bent to their story. Their identities are shaped and erased by the evolving landscape. The soft hues, transparent layering of color, and dis-registered spaces between larger shapes create ghostly figures that evade solid form.

Through the intaglio process, Dancy used multiple aquatint plates to maximize color mixing possibilities and contrasted these layers against more painterly sugar lift marks. Colors, shapes, and lines repeat and morph from one image to the next and the prints are intended to be read from left to right: Red Flag, Green Earth and Blue Omen. The alternating compressed and expanded sizes of the prints interrupt the scrolling of the eye, like a lens zooming and panning a scene. The deep green eye in Blue Omen glances to the far right, suggesting more images in the series to come.

In the studio