Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Gelah Penn

The sinewy, abstract installations by New York City artist Gelah Penn fall somewhere between sketch and sculpture. The site-specific works don’t hang politely on walls or ignore them completely — they take over, as if they grew organically on the gallery walls like alien plants, both utterly beautiful and unsettling. Penn, who has described what she constructs as a “kind of meaty ephemerality,” is the visiting artist of this year’s Visiting Artist Lecture Series. Penn is influenced by film noir and fiction; you know those uneasy sound effects they use in movies at tense moments? Looking at her works can feel sort of like that, in the most fascinating way possible.