The Travelers, 4th Wall Gallery, Oakland, CA
On the Rooftop 3
2021
6.25” x 8”
February 21st- April 4th 2026
By Lani Asher
The Travelers, a show by artist Gina Pearlin at Oakland 4th Wall Gallery, is a surprising collection of 33 small oil paintings and 11 works on paper. The surprise comes both from their diminutive sizes and the hypnotic imagery that draws you into Pearlin's paintings. She began this series in 2021 during Covid, where time seemed to stop not only on a personal level but on a planetary one. The liminal spaces created in her paintings seem appropriate in a world facing monumental change. Covid brought about a complete reordering of everyday life and a complete collapse of everything we trusted.
Yet, Pearlin liked the solitude of Covid; for her, it was a time of going inward. When things started to change, and she reentered the world, she wondered what to do in the studio. "I was having a lot of dreams about train stations and missing trains. But the paintings are not my dreams, and they are not an intellectual exercise. Doing them just felt meaningful to me".
Before she started teaching, Pearlin studied dreamwork and hypnotherapy, a guided relaxation technique. Glimpses of our dreams often enter our waking life through synchronicities, trance states, and the supernatural, according to Pearlin. Hypnotherapy helps you access the trance states we have in our lives that happen all the time. In the dreamwork, there are two methods to analyze dreams. One method is one-to-one, where the dreamer uncovers the meaning of their dream. The other method is to relate your dream to a group where other people project their own meanings on the dream. I think of this series of paintings as something others can project on. I like to name them afterward: Leaving, Passing By, Aftermath, On Ice, for example. The titles, like the paintings, are moving through something, and are in transit. They are not illustrations of dreams."
In the Hedges
2021
Oil on panel, framed with True-Vue museum glass
7” x 7.375”
The smooth surface of the oil paintings creates a cinematic or dream-like feeling, but the content is fairly ordinary, with tiny people waiting at train stations, tiny women next to clotheslines on rooftops, figures walking under bridges in the snow, walking on pathways between blocky apartment buildings, walking on ice floes, or riding bikes. The skies in her paintings have storm clouds or are painted in unearthly yellow colors that help create an uncanny feeling. Her imagery of rooftops, bridges, passageways, and train stations is liminal space. Liminal spaces are unsettling, haunted spaces, passageways, doors to the unknown, spaces in transition that are uncomfortable because, as human beings, we naturally fear the unknown. Metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico addressed these types of spaces with his paintings of mannikins, train stations, shadows, and empty urban spaces. The Surrealists followed with their absurdist and dream-based work created after World War I, and the end of the civilized world they knew. Pearlin's paintings are contemporary and echo the concerns and imagery of these painters as she creates her own stories that are inscrutable, where something menacing is often hidden under the veneer of normality.
At the back of the gallery is a diorama of a model train station with vintage 1.87-scale German railroad figures for her painting Station. This is only one of the many dioramas Gina Pearlin used to create the small stage-like sets that prefigured her paintings. The model train stations, apartment buildings, and bridges that she uses are all found materials. Pearlin photographs these dioramas and paints from one of the photographs. Pearlin thinks of the models not as her finished work but as a means to arrive at a painting. According to Pearlin, "the scale is very important because they are like stage sets. They are illusions based on an ambiguous reality. But the paintings are based on observation. If they were larger, she said, it would destroy the illusion".
Pearlin looks at the photos as a collaboration between herself, the printer, and the computer. Using artificial light allowed her to light the dioramas in ways that resulted in some surprising images. A consistent light source created the shadows. Sometimes the shadows are distorted, and sometimes she removes them.
Travelers
2021
Oil on panel, framed with True-Vue museum glass
6.75” x 9.625”
In her painting Travelers, we see a group of figures with their backs turned to us, clasping their luggage and walking towards the horizon. Each traveler is self-contained and does not interact with the others. I wonder where they are going. Several shadows are not connected to any of the figures and appear to be slipping over the edge. The shadows appear to have their own agency. They don't always feel connected with real time and space.
Pearlin took hundreds of photos of each diorama and moved the figures around countless times until they felt right. She prefers toy figures and buildings from the 60s and 70s because the older figures are better made. The vintage figures project a nostalgic feeling infused with longing for some imaginary past.
The Hedges shows a woman with her luggage in an enclosed garden bordered by bright green hedges. The style of her dress is old fashioned. The saturated yellow color of the sky creates a strange unearthly light. There are shadows lurking outside the boundaries of the garden that seem ominous. Gallery owner Susan Aulik noted that the woman in In the Hedges seems like she is entering a labyrinth where circumambulating the pathways can lead to a state of meditation, or it can be a perplexing complex of dead endings and passageways with no way out.
Island
2022
Oil on panel, framed with True-Vue museum glass
6” x 9”
The Island features a small island with a tiny woman sitting atop a pile of sand at her writing desk. She is utterly alone but unconcerned about the precarity of the situation. She seems intent on writing while the storm clouds threaten and waves lap around the island.
When I asked Pearlin why she makes the work she does, she replied, "Although it's not a popular thing to say these days, painting this series is my therapy, keeping me sane in the shit show of world events."
For me, Pearlin's paintings awaken feelings of dread, but also glimpses of precognition and prophecy. Like the Fool card in the Tarot, we are about to step off a cliff into the unknown, and we don't know what's going to happen. But like the Fool, we must trust the universe to take a leap of faith into the unknown. Her paintings made me think about mortality. The paintings, because their small size required that I stop and slow down to look carefully into these miniature worlds of somnambulists moving through uncharted territory that appears eerily familiar.
