I am thrilled to announce my participation in the inaugural group exhibition of JDJ at their new space in TriBeCa, opening November 16th, 6-8pm.
370 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10013
Transcendence
November 16, 2023 - January 13, 2024
JDJ
370 Broadway, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10013
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 16, 6-8 pm
JDJ is thrilled to inaugurate its new home in Tribeca at 370 Broadway with an intergenerational exhibition of artists who aim to create works that reach beyond the concrete world and tap into the metaphysical realm. Participating artists include:
Beverly Acha
Barrow Parke
Myles Bennett
Miriam Cahn
Marylyn Dintenfass
Julia Felsenthal
Heather Guertin
Adam Henry
Minako Iwamura
Jenny Kemp
Gyorgy Kepes
Amy Lincoln
Ana Mendieta
Paola Oxoa
Elliott Puckette
Whether inspired by optical or nature-based phenomena, or their own personal sense of interiority, these artists use color, light, form, space, and poetic gesture as a means of exploring worlds within and outside of our corporeal existence. Several through lines emerge—among them: a systematic process of removal or negation, whether of color or of material; a fascination with light and the ever-changing qualities of the atmosphere, and subtle shifts in color gradation that elicit an emotional response from the viewer.
Beverly Acha (b. 1981, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY)
Beverly Acha captures the intangible sensorial and psychological experience of space through color and repetition in her paintings, which convey a visual language and logic in response to the environment in which they are made. Referencing architecture, diagrams, and landscape, her core concern is the perceptual slippage within these systems, the spaces between knowing and seeing, experience and memory, and the real and the imagined. Influenced by science fiction’s ability to employ the uncanny to build worlds that challenge our reality and the systems we accept as static, Acha’s work can be approached as a type of world building for a more internal and felt landscape.
Barrow Parke (Mark Barrow b. 1981, Sarah Parke b. 1982, live and work in Queens, NY)
The collaborative art practice of Barrow Parke focuses on the process of weaving and its relationship to visual systems. They are known for their intricate paintings on hand-woven fabric, where painted surfaces interact with its color, texture and pattern. In a series of works from 2013-2016, an example of which is on view here, Barrow Parke conflated the Cartesian logic underlying the structure of weaving with that of the CMYK color space used in commercial printing. White paint is used to negate the thread colors in varying ratios, so new fields of color emerge. By positioning one system within another, the artists draw connections between the craft of weaving, color theory, and digital technology.
Myles Bennett (b. 1983, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY)
Myles Bennett’s work is centered around the intersection of architectural drawings, 18th-century landscape paintings, and the organized space of woven and raw canvas. His geometric abstractions explore the material capabilities of canvas in innovative ways, deconstructing and reimagining the picture plane. Bennett’s approach combines a variety of techniques, including intricate pencil drawings that are guided by the canvas grain, inking into the cotton fibers, and the precise extraction of a canvas’s warp in order to merge his curiosities and the surface’s condition into an aesthetic balancing act.
Miriam Cahn (b. 1949, lives and works in Stampa, Switzerland)
Miriam Cahn uses the body as inspiration for an emotive sensibility or force that cannot be contained by its boundaries. Initially influenced by performance art and feminist movements of the 1960s & 1970s, Cahn would use her entire body in monumentally-scaled charcoal drawings, sometimes blindfolding herself in order to reduce the influence of her mind within the creative process. The paintings she has made since the 1980s, the subject matter of which represents a diverse range of subjects—human relationships, war and conflict, nature and landscape—use vibrant, electrifying color to convey intense emotion, as though the figures in her works have a palpable inner life.
Marylyn Dintenfass (b. 1943, lives and works in New York and Garrison, NY)
Best known for her monumental abstractions, Marylyn Dintenfass often uses circular shapes in her paintings. For the artist, the shape conveys multitudes, from metaphysical symbolism, to the architecture of ancient religious buildings, to microscopic organisms and blood cells. The repetition of forms in her paintings allows Dintenfass to use color as an emotive and transportive force: she applies it with varying opacities, which allows each layer to interact with one another. While some painterly marks reveal the presence of Dintenfass’ hand, others make use of a highly controlled, hard-edge matrix derived from ring-like templates of her own design. The juxtaposition of the organic and mathematical is a critical element within her oeuvre and a subject carried throughout the artist’s practice.
Julia Felsenthal (b. 1983, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Cape Cod, MA)
Julia Felsenthal’s intimately-scaled watercolor paintings evoke the quiet profundity of the ocean as witnessed from the beaches near her studio on Cape Cod. Each painting offers a distinct, devotional meditation on the meeting of sky and sea, and on the varied color and texture effects created by the Cape’s ever-shifting atmospheric conditions. At once rigidly simple in their compositional constraints and obsessively dense in their mark-making, Felsenthal’s paintings toe a central fault-line: they celebrate and chronicle the protean nature of water and air while indulging and interrogating the all-too-human desire to halt time, to screenshot a view, or to crystallize the fleeting emotions we experience while viewing it.
Heather Guertin (b. 1981, lives and works in Red Hook, NY)
Awash in color and texture, Heather Guertin’s intricate oil paintings are derived from images she finds in discarded books. Approaching the act of painting with a sense of openness, Guertin searches for her paintings through the material she comes across. She allows the found imagery to guide the form, color and value in the painting, but her singular vision pushes these fragments into new worlds. Guertin manipulates the paint in highly textured ways, turning realistic subject matter into abstraction through her brushwork: large, thick swoops of oil paint and tiny raised dots on top of fields of color, a reference to the printing mechanics of the found images. The resulting works are, in essence, an act of transformation, as she filters the collages through her own painterly vision.
Adam Henry (b. 1974, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY)
At the core of Adam Henry’s practice is a fascination with perception and cognition. Henry’s interest in the poetry of silence, or sonic absence, manifests in a recent series on view here, in which a photograph of a foreboding landscape has been ripped in a unique pattern that resembles a bolt of lightning across a dark sky. The work’s broader metaphorical resonance lies in the weather phenomenon it depicts, much like a distant lightning strike is seen first and then heard later, or sometimes not at all. At the core of this work is the sometimes blurry distinction between sound and silence, or sound that is seemingly “real” or only in our heads.
Minako Iwamura (b.1967, lives and works in New York, NY)
With their biomorphic forms, Minako Iwamura’s paintings exist in a liminal state that feels both abstract and corporeal. She uses geometry, color, and pattern to explore the psychological undertones conveyed by their juxtapositions. On view are a series of recent paintings that introduce vessel-like shapes painted in delicate gradients that can take on the appearance of bodily forms. An installation of small-scale paintings incorporates an intricate web of fractal-like drawings made with gossamer-thin lines of white charcoal. Iwamura’s interest lies in the exploration of dualities—geometry and nature, the singular and the collective, premeditated delineation and intuitive movement—and the slippage between them.
Jenny Kemp (b. 1979, lives and works in Troy, NY)
Exploring intuition through linear forms, Jenny Kemp’s paintings serve as conduits for trains of thought. Her work uses a limited vocabulary of forms that are set in motion through vibrant yet subtle shifts of color. Ambiguous in nature, and sly in their slight figurative associations, Kemp’s abstractions originate from a singular gesture of line, and grow into being through intuitive and inspired acts of construction. Created by hand with painterly precision, her paintings incorporate a fantastic sense of tension between hard-edge and free-form sensibilities. The rhythmic lines and shapes converse with one another through accumulations of modulating color.
Gyorgy Kepes (b. 1906, d. 2001, lived and worked in Cambridge and Wellfleet, MA)
Gyorgy Kepes was a Hungarian-born artist, theorist, designer and educator, and author. In 1937, he emigrated to the US and taught at the New Bauhaus alongside Lázló Moholy-Nagy in Chicago. In 1967, Kepes founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At the focus of Kepes’s oeuvre is the concept that art has the potential to serve as a means to transform the inner self, to raise social consciousness, and to imagine a more robust and equitable world. His robust artistic output was diverse: examples of his abstract paintings, which were influenced by the observation of light and atmosphere in Cape Cod, and his photograms, are included in this exhibition.
Amy Lincoln (b. 1981, lives and works in New York, NY)
Amy Lincoln paints scenes of imagined landscapes, atmospheric activity and vibrant, fantastical foliage, and her works serve as an exploration of light reflection and refraction. Her formally simplified approach to landscape allows her to maintain the focus on a pulsating, emotive sense of color that is present in her work. Lincoln systematically layers color in bands from light to dark, creating an illusion of space and depth. Although her compositions are dream-like and tranquil, they belie her fascination with precise systems related to nature, color, and opticality.
Ana Mendieta (b. 1948, d. 1985, lived and worked in New York, NY)
Born in Cuba, and having emigrated to the US during the Cuban revolution, interdisciplinary artist Ana Mendieta has remarked that her oeuvre centers upon her belief in one universal energy which runs through all matter and beings, and through all space and time. The works and performances she created in her brief yet prolific career center on themes of exile, displacement, and a return to the land. Mendieta sought to fuse earth and form in her practice, and was fascinated by the marks of aging that objects can bear. This unique drawing on a leaf, part of a series she began in 1982, is exemplary of this fascination, allowing her to incorporate the element of time as part of the work finding its own form.
Paola Oxoa (b. 1979, lives and works in New York and Beacon, NY)
Paola Oxoa’s abstract paintings record states of awareness. Fusing landscape and the body as fluid containers of unified and intelligent energies, she bypasses representing what is seen in favor of what is felt, intuited, or understood. Her works synthesize and communicate her lived experience through the formal elements of painting.
Elliott Puckette (b. 1967, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY)
The elegant simplicity of Elliott Puckette’s line belies its complex process. With brisk, confident gestures, the artist etches inlets into board washed with layers of gesso and ink. The colored washes create distinctive atmospheres in each work. Puckette uses a razor blade to draw her arcs, carving out pathways instinctively with exquisite light touch, then deepening them with cross-hatching—a labor-intensive process that inherently slows the line, subtracting it from the painting and delineating its negative space.