ANGELA LANE

Angela Lane interrupts her calm pastoral landscapes with depictions of extraordinary meteorological phenomena that seem at once fatal and visionary. Eclipsed suns hover above still lakes, radiating beams descend across valleys and wooded streams, and luminous halos, or mirrored moons emerge within pale skies and mist-cloaked summits. Executed in oil on birch panels, the intimate scale of these works compel viewers to draw physically near in order to fully register Lane’s delicate shifts in hue, softened reflections, and gradual painterly articulations. Despite these diminutive dimensions, the paintings evoke a striking sense of vastness and solitude, balancing grounded naturalistic environments with atmospheric sights that suspend ordinary understandings of perception and scale.

For her exhibition, Lane has chosen the title Phase Shift; a technical term in physics that refers to the measurable displacement between repeating waves, oscillations, or signals. Colloquially it can describe being ‘out of sync’ or the subtle realignment that comes from a change of perception—in other words, an awakening. The title points toward a broader interest in how reality is experienced and interpreted. The word phenomenon derives from the Greek phainómena, meaning “things that appear,” which frames reality in terms of appearance to a perceiver, rather than as an objective condition. The paintings are situated within an unstable territory between fixed observation and apparition. As open encounters, they register atmospheric fact, psychological imprint, mirage, and visionary horror and majesty.

Although Lane paints exclusively in her studio—never en plein air—these works are rooted in the isolation and expansiveness of nature. These marvelous phenomena and the landscapes where they occur are inseparable conditions rather than distinct subjects. This idea resonates with Walter De Maria’s description of The Lightning Field, where he states that “the land is not the setting for the work of art, but part of the work.” Lane’s remarkable occurrences take place in specific environments; she captures the particular convergence of seasonal, environmental, atmospheric, conditions inseparable from their geographic site.

Void of architecture, infrastructure, or human presence, the paintings evoke an environment before or beyond civilization—reduced to earth, water, air, dust, and light. This sense of solitude and atmosphere of isolation becomes central to the experience of the work itself. Lane’s landscapes are experienced privately and at close range; one approaches the panel alone, heightening our sensitivity to the immensity and intimacy of confronting the serene and unsettling unknown. Windows to the realms of impressions, perceptions, allusions to the psychological and physiological aspects of seeing.

Angela Lane (b. 1974, United Kingdom) made her American debut in 2022 with a solo exhibition Beside the Sun at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA. Phosphene, her first solo exhibition in a public institution took place in 2023 at City Gallery Wellington in the capital of Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has been included in group exhibitions since then at James Cohan, New York, NY; Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Meyer Riegger, Berlin, Germany; and Cob Gallery, London, UK. Concurrent to her solo show Phase Shift in Los Angeles, Lane has curated an expansive group exhibition in New York titled Illuminations. Lane lives and works in Raumati, New Zealand.