Altman Siegel is pleased to present From: Know-Here-With-This, Jessica Dickinson’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Time and change, always central concerns throughout Dickinson’s oeuvre, are highlighted for the first time in the installation, as her work will shift and rotate in position four times throughout the duration of the show. The exhibition features four new paintings which were developed simultaneously over the course of the past year. As each work evolves, Dickinson periodically records large-scale graphite rubbings documenting the changing surface. Each finished painting produces a suite of these drawings, or remainders that record its evolution over time. Rarely exhibited in their entirety due to their scale, the shifting nature of this exhibition will allow for each painting to be presented for a period in the gallery’s main space alongside the full set of remainders.
Focusing on the sensations of time, light, and matter within shifting philosophical, perceptual, and psychological states, Dickinson is interested in how the experience of passing time can be at once physical, emotional, linguistic, and ephemeral. And, through this, she considers how painting proposes an important site of tactile and durational encounter within our contemporary environment of increasingly disembodied exchanges. Inspired by frescoes altered through chance and erosion, Dickinson works with oil on a plaster-like surface. Stages of repetitive marking and notching, aggressive chiseling, sudden removal, invisible labor, illumination, and aggregated layering become inscribed in the body of the painting. Influenced by feminist thought to dislocate hierarchical terms of the sublime, Dickinson’s sources of abstraction are derived from momentary and minor events in everyday life that interrupt and shift one’s consciousness. Shapes of light, shadow, concrete, patterns, windows, and doorways become veils, obstructions, thresholds, or openings. Invested in the overlooked, Dickinson’s work honors shifts in how what we “see” – internally and outwardly – unfolds and transforms through time.
The artist’s remainders are produced after completing a significant stage of their making, to register a visual impression of the entire surface as it changes. As sedimentary events, they materialize forms within the paintings that become invisible, partial, or erased, yet are integral to their final state. Installed directly on the wall in order from left to right, they unveil an imprint of the past within an immersive field, proposing poetic and temporal narratives. Whereas the paintings compress time and event into chromatic, luminous, and material surfaces, the remainders unfold laterally and sequentially with ghost-like topographies. Incorporating loss as a form of structure, an intimate and quiet monumentality emerges through a variety of oscillations and transitions. |
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