Presence/Absence

January 4 - 27, 2018
First Thursday Reception: January 4, 6 - 8 pm

Jason Vance Dickason
John David Forsgren
Stephen Hayes
Jackson Pollock

Presence/Absence features black and white artworks by Jason Vance Dickason, John David Forsgren, Stephen Hayes, and Jackson Pollock in styles ranging from abstraction to figuration.

The group exhibition focuses on the artists’ use of minimal color palette to highlight distillations of gesture and form. Through paintings and works on paper, these diverse artists demonstrate harmonious balance between presence and absence; intention and accident; order and chaos; action and repose.

Highlights include lithographs by Jackson Pollock made in the early 1950s, created after he broke the boundaries of abstraction in the 1940s. Pollock made an unexpected and dramatic return to figuration in the 1950s using only black inks and paints. The resulting images are frenetic and ambiguously amorphous, possessing both figurative and abstract elements. Hidden faces and limbs seem to emerge from the splattered ink lines in wonderfully puzzling compositions.

Stephen Hayes portrays the human condition through intuitive sketches of nude figures he made in 1993. The figures portrayed in the series of monotypes on view possess an enigmatic, primal quality that gorgeously captures the mood and immediacy of Hayes’ painting practice.

John David Forsgren shows elegant restraint in his sensuously structured grids which emanate like branches throughout  India ink-stained canvases. Forsgren’s liquid lines appear at once structured and organic, like an intricate system of interconnected veins or an aerial landscape view.

Jason Vance Dickason uses oil paint to explore refracted light and shadow, and balances his geometry of angled shapes with swooping flourishes. Dickason’s painted surfaces are richly layered and then scraped to reveal striations and gestural marks with luscious texture.