Different Things and in Different Amounts

Different Things and in Different Amounts examines the complex lives of images in the work of seven contemporary artists. The artworks, when considered collectively, pose fundamental yet expansive questions about what imagery is and where it comes from.

Many of the artists included in this exhibition are interested in that hard-to-pin-down moment in an artwork’s development—where a gathering or layering of materials begins to slip into something we might call an image by becoming, or registering, as more than its constituent parts. This overarching interest in the qualities of emergence, the process of coming into view, results in a sensibility that openly invites the viewer to read the artwork in relation to an external world.

Here, we might begin to think of imagery as the direct result of a viewer’s capacity to see more than the material facts in front of them. Perhaps, in this way, images are the things lifted off artworks and, consequently, have no material bodies of their own, existing only in the minds and eyes of a viewer. In the end, these artists and their artworks invite us to bring some magic back to the images and objects we think we understand.

Deborah Dancy’s (b. 1949 in Bessemer, Alabama) large-scale, abstract oil paintings describe intimate encounters but render them open-ended, with hands and feet coming and going. Sangram Majumdar’s (b. 1976 in Kolkata, India) recent work also deals with figures and fragments—often depicting recognizable shapes and forms dissolving into storms of color and collaged bits and pieces. Hong Hong (b. 1989 in Hefei, Anhui, China) utilizes cartographic, symbolic, and material languages in her monumentally scaled works on paper that gather natural elements from the outdoor environments her work is cast in. Erin Koch Smith (b. 1981 in Richmond, Virginia) looks to the materiality and handling of paint to disrupt any quick or concise read of the stories told in her work. Julie Torres’s (b. 1971 in Bronx, New York) paintings treat paint as a structural and thus sculptural material, but still end up offering her viewers a stable image with clearly articulated figures and ground. Mariah Dekkenga (b. 1978 in Marathon, Wisconsin), whose work includes abstract oil paintings on linen and time-based animations, makes physical, even sculptural, objects that convey virtual information. In a similar fashion, Daniel Graham Loxton’s (b. 1987 in Montclair, New Jersey) work simultaneously engages multi-dimensionality through illusionistic, two-dimensional space and collage or assemblage approaches to building up the surfaces of his paintings.

This exhibition is organized and curated by artist Douglas Degges (b. 1986 in Shreveport, Louisiana).

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