Ellen Hackl Fagan

Seeking the Sound of Cobalt Blue: Pinwheels

2020

Ellen Hackl Fagan builds connections between color and sound using installations, interactive games, and collaborative projects that combine color-and-texture saturated paintings with music and digital technologies. Each installation invites viewers an opportunity to explore synaesthesia for themselves.

Balanced between randomness and intention, like jazz music, Fagan’s art continues to reveal limitless possibilities for improvisation. Saturation, accident, and the nature of the materials impose their own voice. Color seduces.

Blue is an invitation to get reckless.

Rich, powdery, dangerous, The Void.

Jumping off generates new information. Painting opens the door to life’s patterns. Echoing life’s chaotic beauty, her sources can be linked to pop music, Rimbault, Jungian psychology, the theory of correspondences, Minimalist and decorative art.

Fagan is the inventor of the Reverse Color Organ and the ColorSoundGrammar Game, two projects that enable viewers to interact aurally with color. In collaboration with web architect Joshie Fishbein, the Reverse Color Organ is a web app, downloadable to a smartphone, thus placing this synaesthetic tool into peoples’ hands to be used, not only to expand the language of color, but also as a crowd-sourced musical instrument.

Fagan exhibits her work extensively throughout New England and New York City. In 2014 she expanded her independent curatorial practice into a full-time business and is now the owner of ODETTA Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. There, she maintains her painting studio and is an active member of this vibrant arts community.

Find original Ellen Hackl Fagan paintings and drawings on 1stDibs.

(Biography provided by ODETTA Gallery)