HIERARCHY
BY
CHRISTINE GORBACH

(click on image to see actual size in frame)

Gorbach's paintings explore the human experience of selection, ordering and prioritizing. She composed a poem to describe her thought processes and working methods. In the poem, Gorbach reflects on organizing systems as an individual intellectual activity. Hear the Poem

But What Hierarchy?
A chance creation of
spilled on
dripped on
walked on
rained on
paper canvas

Ahhh...
authentic reality
irrationality
spontaneity
chance
intuition

and then

ORDER
ORDER
ORDER

An abolition of tradition
A comic derision
Thus
the viewer is the kingdom
and decides
the phylum
the family
the genus,
THE SELF


The paintings, prints, and text samples are related to Gorbach's personal definition of hierarchy. She sees this series as a single continuing work where older images evolve in the mind of the artist to inform the new. This process began with a large painting on heavy brown paper. This painting measured four feet by fifty feet. As she lived with this work she noticed areas of special interest on the large surface that suggested smaller paintings complete in themselves.

Gorbach systematically searched out these visual moments and extracted them into images that stand on their own. These paintings chronicle a selection process that began in 1997.

The large painting sits at the top of a hierarchical order. The images above represent the first generation. At this point she reached the limit of size. Selecting further from these small images would be impractical without magnification.

In 2001, she crossed into the digital domain where she found that selection could continue to ever smaller degrees of detail. By digitizing the small paintings at very high resolution, she found that they could be enlarged to reveal detail that had been hidden from the eye. High resolution scanners and large format inkjet printers opened the door to further exploration.

Her most recent works show the results of this new way of manipulating and transforming material into the third and forth generation.

As Gorbach uses her artist's eye to traverse the deeper levels, the bottom is still not in sight.

see the new work