Imlay Gallery is pleased to present Tempestas: Joyce Korotkin and Saydi Callahan

In ancient Roman times, Tempestas is a goddess of storms or sudden weather. The Roman people regarded certain natural phenomena such as rainbows and clouds as divine. Artists Joyce Korotkin and Saydi Callahan investigate our place in the Universe at this particular moment in time using landscape and portrait painting as metaphors for identity and experience.

Saydi Callahan is a portrait painter who investigates persona through both abstraction and realism. She is influenced by Greek and Byzantine icons and mythology, which she saw growing up in her Greek community in Florida. Her abstract portraits radiate out of a single cyclopian eye, which for the artist represents “a spiritual window.” She wants the viewer to feel the intense and confrontational gaze of the eye as it watches and assess the world, while simultaneously reflecting back the viewer’s image.

Joyce Korotkin is know for her evocative and haunting landscape paintings in oil and encaustic that hover between abstraction and representation. Her works elicit the evanescent moments we all own; those that light the sky and the troubled world below it with moments of peaceful serenity or with a fiery beauty that hangs suspended for but a heartbeat, before disappearing into the jarring uncertainties of tomorrow.