Thu Apr 02, 2015 00:00 - Sat May 02, 2015

San Francisco, California
United States of America

Jaq Chartier
A Fever in Matter
April 2 - May 2, 2015

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition of paintings by the Seattle-based artist Jaq Chartier. A Fever in Matter features colorful abstract works made in Chartier’s signature Testing style and inspired by Lewis Wolberg’s book, Micro-Art: Art Images in a Hidden World. In one of the book’s essays Brian O’Doherty writes:
… the understanding of crystal structure in terms of mathematics (that is, logic) confirmed a schism in matter - between the organic and the inorganic. Life could be seen as an inexplicable vitalism on the one hand, and on the other a delusion within the inorganic, or, as it has been called, a fever in matter.

Chartier’s paintings—matter, vitalized—are the result, not of romantic or expressionist ecstasy, but orderly, almost scientific investigations into the properties of color. In this sense, they continue the color-optics explorations of Josef Albers’ famous Homage to the Square oil paintings on panel, compositionally simple yet radiant works composed of three or four squares, variously colored and unmodulated, with their overlapping arrangements implying portals and corridors seen in perspective. Chartier:
I love exploring color and the interactions of the materials. The paintings are stripped down to very specific rules; each painting must be an actual test of some kind, and every element has to be there for a reason which supports the test.

If Albers appended his notations on colors and varnishes to the backs of panels, Chartier includes notations right in the works; her method is transparent, and her results reproducible—verifiable. Her arrays of organic forms are drawn with an eye dropper and suggest the samples, tests and charts of the natural scientist in the field, while the white backgrounds behind her overlays of transparent color suggest illuminated microscope slides. In some works, dark-rimmed circles, like Petri dishes, black-rimmed yellow-orange scorch marks, and cellular honeycomb polygons replace the painterly arrays of color swatches; in others, the patterns coalesce into abstract imagery, evoking natural forces metaphorically or metonymically while remaining ambiguous and multivalent.
Chartier describes her minimalist Testing series, featuring arrays of dots connected by or enveloped by horizontal bands of color, reminiscent of illustrations of the stages of cell division, or rippling wavelets on sunlit water, with positive and negative reversed, as if solarized:
…each painting begins as an actual test. Inspired by scientific images like gel electrophoresis, they feature intimate views of materials reacting to each other, to light, and the passage of time. Instead of paint, I use my own complex formulas of deeply saturated inks, stains and dyes. Such colors can do things paint can't do – change, shift, and migrate through other layers of paint, or separate into component parts with differing properties. Whereas traditional artist paints are formulated to be stable and controllable, stains are capricious and easily affected by lots of factors like humidity, gravity, time, UV light – even the structure of molecules in the other elements they touch. After years of study I'm still intrigued by the hidden chemistries of these materials. I write notations directly on the paintings to help me track what’s happening in each test.

(DNA electrophoresis is a method of sorting DNA molecules electrically by length for purposes of diagnostic analysis. The negatively charged DNA is drawn to the positively charged part of the gel matrix in which they are suspended.) Chartier’s lyrical SubOptic series was similarly based on scientific methods, including X-rays of coral reef colonies that reveal their delicate internal structure, and which provided the artist a subject with which to tackle the daunting question of climate change. The Ultra Marine series depicted marine bio- and phytoplankton in simplified shapes and brilliant colors, with the angle of vision ranging from the microscopic, as in her depiction of blue polyps and rippling water, to the macroscopic, as in her painting from above, as if seen from a satellite, of Antarctica as a kind of coral atoll ringed by green—or protoplasmic superorganism. A Fever in Matter includes works from all three series, providing a synoptic overview of the artist’s interests and directions.

While Chartier’s approach appears empirical and scientific, her work’s electric color, graphic power and use of metaphor paradoxically produce poetic images reminiscent of such visionary artists as Vincent Van Gogh, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keefe, Charles Burchfield and Mark Tobey.

Chartier received her BFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts and MFA in painting from the University of Washington in 1994. Her work has been exhibited in museums across the country, including the Seattle Art Museum, San Jose ICA, Bellevue Art Museum, and the Palm Springs Desert Museum. She has been reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle, Artweek, Art in America, New American Paintings, and Artforum. This will be Chartier's first solo show at Dolby Chadwick Gallery.

Thu Feb 05, 2015 17:30 - Sat Feb 28, 2015

San Francisco, California
United States of America

Vanessa Marsh
Everywhere All at Once
February 5—28, 2015

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is pleased to announce “Everywhere All at Once,” an exhibition of work by Bay Area–artist Vanessa Marsh. This presentation will feature, among other works, a new series of landscapes distinguished as much by their pared-down, graphic aesthetic—which she achieves by harnessing photogramic techniques—as they are by their mysterious, dream-like moods. In some works, space is articulated by layering multiple two-dimensional planes, or what Marsh likens to independent, freely-moving tectonic plates. For example, the silhouettes of a palm tree and electrical wires and poles in the foreground of Landscape #5 are articulated in opaque black, while modern-day windmills lining the hills in the background comprise a second layer that is rendered in a lighter grey. Other landscapes dramatically collapse depth by utilizing a single plane, such as Landscape #7, which depicts crisscrossing strands of pennant flags at close range. All of the landscapes in this series—also titled “Everywhere All at Once”—are set against the same vast night sky, punctuated by stars whose diffuse light makes them appear to almost glow.

“The act of making art is this constant mining of memory and experience,” Marsh says, explaining that several sets of memories have shaped this series. They include her own childhood experience of the sublime upon discovering that light emitted from stars has traveled sometimes billions of light years before reaching our eyes; a reoccurring apocalyptic nightmare, set in an open field and marked by an erratically behaving moon brought on, ostensibly, by man’s abuse of the planet; and, finally, Marsh’s attempts to channel the memories of experiences that have befallen others. For Marsh, memory and landscape form a bidirectional relationship. Her memories provide the visual inspiration for her imagined landscapes, which themselves function symbolically as vehicles for articulating the sometimes incomprehensibility of memory, for capturing memories that exist only in our collective consciousness, or for confronting memories of events that never actually were: “a lot of the works speak to a sense of isolation, how that isolation relates to the landscape, and how I find myself in that landscape—physically, metaphorically, spiritually.”

Despite their perceived eeriness—an effect amplified by the fact that there is no direct light source—the works also communicate a sense of optimism and “the potential for regrowth and feeling” in the face of turmoil and destruction. Marsh’s landscapes are not specific but rather cumulative, articulating both many places simultaneously (“everywhere all at once”), the rapidly shifting nature of today’s built and natural environments, and vastness that characterizes not just earth, but earth’s relationship to the wider solar system, galaxy, and beyond. It is this overwhelming sense of the sublime that informs Marsh’s understanding of the future:

“Looking out over the landscape the night sky provides a reminder of the smallness of our existence and also the vast possibilities inherent to our experience. It provides a connection between distant individuals, a jumping off point for belief systems and mythos, and an interstellar reference that helps us to navigate our own world. For me, more than anything, it provides a sense of space and infinity that is at once the essence of openness and possibility and also terrifyingly complex and unfathomable.”

Vanessa Marsh was born Seattle, Washington, in 1978. She earned her BA from Western Washington University in 2001 followed by her MFA in 2004 from California College of the Arts. Marsh has exhibited across the United States, including at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery at UC Davis, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; Foley Gallery in New York and The Camera Club of New York. She has been awarded Fellowships at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2004), The MacDowell Colony (2007) and Kala Art Institute (2011.) In 2014, she was an Artist in Residence at Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco.