Gay Outlaw is a gifted photographer with a palpable gift of direct expression and evocative communication. However, Gay is far too creative to be constrained by the inherent limitations of photography, and has branched out into various types of art work, including etching and sculpture.

Often conceptual in nature, Gay's works invoke issues of mutability, spatiality, phenomenology, quantum theory, and metaphysics. Dichotomies involving the mind, the body, perception and the perceiver are palpable. The object is the thing, but the both the viewer and the object are changed by the viewing process. Questions of the physical vs. the mental and nature of judgment arise. Is perception meaningful? Does empiricism make the cultural world an illusion, by ignoring the internal connection between the object and the act? Do analytic causalities appraise meaning? Is dualism inevitable? What are the boundaries of subject, object, observer, cognition, and concept? What are the manifestations of the ideational and the material? Do we distinguish between the act of perceiving and the thing perceived? This is not a pipe.

The granddaughter of an industrial concrete magnate, Gay has led an interesting life. Gay was born in 1959 in Mobile, Alabama, and has a bachelor's degree in French from the University of Virginia. A few years were spent in Paris, where she studied gourmet cooking at the École de Cuisine La Varenne. Eventually Gay settled in San Francisco.

View some examples of Gay's work.

"What an artist needs, more than anything else, is a kind of faith in what you're doing and the discipline to do it." Gay Outlaw, 2001.

"It takes courage to put your money in the arts." Gay Outlaw, 1989.

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