Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is delighted to share their current exhibition of recent paintings and photographs by Deborah Dancy. And All is Always Now. The show runs through March 23, 2024 at the gallery’s 20th Street location.
The exhibition title borrows a line from T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” the first of his Four Quartets poems. At its heart he is wrestling with the stillness of the everyday, the passage of time and melancholy. These touchstones of human fragility have entered the body of work exhibited here. The paintings and photographs are shaped by the residue of grief as they explore the sensory, the temporal and how bewilderment, fragility, and ambiguity share something bittersweet. In the photographs the seemingly unnoteworthy found object becomes an offering. In the paintings, something of the fleeting presence of light is captured in the fragment of painterly gesture. As Pico Iyer notes in his book Autumn Light, loss offers a portal to finding beauty in impermanence and luminosity in loss.
This exhibition marks a new direction in the paintings of Deborah Dancy. The bold forms and strong palette of previous paintings have melted into a whirling space where nothing is solid. Horizontal brushstrokes of subtle color create a hazy landscape in which insubstantial shapes flicker and fade. Ambiguous gestures are also captured in Dancy’s recent photographs of faded flowers. Their wilted shapes, blurry against an inky blackness, also suggest the sense of vulnerability that reflects uncertain times.
