EXHIBITIONS
current
SEPTEMBER 12 - OCTOBER 17, 2024
6’ Poems | Jack Albrittain
Jack Albrittain, Lavender with Cracks, 2024, Oil and distemper on linen, 53” X 58”
PRESS RELEASE
When the world is too large to bear the weight of,
We retreat back into our caves.
A painter’s studio is no more than a house,
A space to get dirty in.
We glorify these works, in writing, in institution,
but perhaps we should not,
As it only separates us further from ourselves.
Making marks on the wall,
The same marks we did as children,
That received some type of admonishment.
A thrill, to be told, not to, do, something.
And it is thrilling to see, still,
the marks we can make.
These gorgeous accidents,
The antithesis of conceptualization,
Something that requires only action–
This idea that anything could be done without thought,
That is A Thrill, to behold.
That is the effort – letting go.
We can get lost at sea, or on land, it turns out,
Or on the deck of the very boat you set sail on.
You may be moved, by the work itself,
Or you can create your own wind
With your flailing limbs.
And sometimes, a third thing appears,
I don’t dare say the word.
Living and not, we are all here together,
These poems you see,
Are the truest portraits of a time lived;
Messy, well, frenetic, Dead,
And writhing.
Jack Albrittain (b. 1994) is a painter from Vienna, Virginia and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Please join us at the gallery Thursday, September 12 for an Opening Reception,
6-8PM
previous
JULY 25 - SEPT 6, 2024
HOME IS YOU, RIGHT NOW | an inaugural group show featuring works by
SACHA ALEXANDRA, HANNAH EPSTEIN, JACK ALBRITTAIN, AMANDA GUEST, KARINY PADILLA, OPHELIA ARC, JULIA JUSTO, SIKA FOYER, LEE SMITH, XINGYUN WANG, ELIZABETH AWALT, ISIS DAVIS-MARKS, TOVA CARLIN, KEVIN LOWENTHAL, KATE AWALT-CONLEY, MARY BOO ANDERSON, ELAINE ANGELOPOULOS
PRESS RELEASE
RUBY/DAKOTA is excited to announce Home is You, Right Now, a debut group exhibition of multi-disciplinary and multi-generational 21st century artists in conjunction with its opening day.
Inspired by the gallerist’s inner journey home – objectified as the image of an empty house – this collection of artworks speak to the double-sided nature of our conscious and unconscious drives that pull us toward homecoming, the body’s impulse to replay the past over and over, and the murky temporal space we all inhabit between childhood and adulthood.
Perhaps it is you, hidden inside the epidermic layers of tissue over thick Bristol paper, draped across your girlfriend’s body, all skin and also nothing, like pareidolia in the clouds. Youth always tries to find its shape. A self-portrait is always a map to the past, as if you had a choice to go back. As if staring into that gaping fish’s mouth, all toothless and gummy, in the nightmare you are just awakening from, startled and exhausted, offered you a portal.
Intricate, solitary, obsessive motions of string entanglements juxtapose sensual, romantic strokes in paintings steeped in vibrant color and unconscious desire, creating a haziness where what’s invisible might be more affective in your body than what’s visible, offering a language of sensation with an uncannily familiar quality.
With works hung like relics of a deemed-deranged teenage girl’s bedroom aligned in a gridlike formation, mimicking a white picket fence, Ruby/Dakota transforms itself structurally into a blatant symbol of middle-class American safety, an illusory, paradoxically romantic and deadening dream of home, located somewhere between aberration, fine art and fallacy.
Within distorted scales and exposed intimacy at various levels of subject matter, language and process, this collection asks us to look closely at ourselves beneath the veils of our projected selves in our memory-films playing on repeat. Does you refer to Self or Other, and what happens in that parallax view between either/or? Where is home, if not in the physical object, and what is the cost of living in and for another’s organism, even at the risk of our own disappearance? The answer, the show offers, might have something to do with love.
—Rachel Nagelberg
Please join us at the gallery Friday, September 6 for a closing reception
6-8PM
