Madeline Gallucci

My work examines reflective and transitory sites such as mirrors, windows, and incidental marks found in the Midwestern urban landscape. Through painting, I construct fields that hold traces of what passes across them and what momentarily remains: dust, weather, residue, and fragments of language that feel both urgent and nonsensical.

Pulling from trompe-l’œil and color field painting histories, I move between realism and abstraction to consider how meaning is constructed from the mundane. I am compelled by mismatched paint covering vandalism, scratches etched into windows, and graffiti tags repeated throughout a neighborhood. These gestures produce visual noise while also defining a collective voice, one that becomes specific to place yet remains tied to broader methods of image-making.

Blue painter’s tape has become central to this body of work. As a material that’s used in construction, it signals a neighborhood in process, reconfigured and “revitalized”. In painting, I ask: what does it mean to render something provisional into something permanent? I am interested in how these versions of time collapse into a single picture plane, bringing both anticipation and aftermath into the same surface.

Thoughts on the lab

The LATITUDE residency allowed me to more fully explore my photography practice by scanning studio objects, paintings, and other ephemera to create prints that bring together multiple approaches to image-making.