GAY OUTLAW
Structure and Void

Gay Outlaw’s work in photography and sculpture explores form
through structure, pattern, and translation. Her process often
begins with a photograph. Carrying a camera wherever she goes,
she shoots anything that catches her eye. Once the film is de-
veloped, forms that would otherwise go unnoticed are revealed
in the juxtaposition or cropping of mundane objects.

Outlaw distills the shape or pattern and re-works it in a variety
of media – rubber, cardboard, vinyl, wood, glass. Every-day
material manipulated with considerable labor and skill results
in complicated formality. Structural complexity leads to optical
complexity. Within each work, familiar materials and unfamiliar
forms are perfectly integrated, tweaking perception and denying
you the comfort of trusting the veracity of your experience.

From piece to piece, each re-thinking of the original form leads
to another re-conception. Each shift in scale, material or dimen-
sion is made with such sensitivity and consideration that no
matter how extreme or unexpected, it seems logical, even inev-
itable.

Gay Outlaw was born in Mobile, Alabama and lives and works in
San Francisco. She has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco
Museum of Art, University of California Long Beach, and Mills Col-
lege Art Museum. She has been included in group shows at the
Berkeley Art Museum; the Bronx Museum; the Museum of Con-
temporary Art in Los Angeles; the University of California, Los
Angeles; California College of Arts; and the Sculpture Center in
New York.