NYAB Event - “White Wash” Exhibition

“White Wash” Exhibition

Brian Morris Gallery

This event has ended.

“White Wash” is a group exhibition featuring three painters:
Joe Ballweg, Michael Dotson and Johnny Mullen. The title is taken from one of Dotson’s paintings wherein the act of editing creates form. The works in this show subvert easy readings. Each painter is discursive; flipping surface and ground, combining personal with impersonal mark making. Using the language of abstraction, all 3 artists emphasize gesture in a manner that both embraces and parodies the broad brushwork of Abstract Expressionism.
“White Wash” excitingly deviates from traditional gestural abstraction and veers towards critique, play and humor of its historical function.

Joe Ballweg’s colorful and often humorous oil paintings read as gestural maps, as he butts one large winding form up against another to create sinewy pathways.
His vivid work, Three Sisters, uses hot pink, magentas and purples to create alternating, embossed X patterns. Other works conjure cosmic associations with psychedelic effects. His piece, Soupy Space Cave, is splattered with dotted patterns and spaces that open and close perceptually. Swampy Scraggles is a vivid work that uses orange, yellow and blue to create warped, transposed positive and negative spaces.

Michael Dotson uses gradients, dots and a host of other patterns to create obsessive acrylic paintings reminiscent of digital platforms. In his work, Mystique, he intersects a bright blue background with a central, red rectangular form. Alongside it lie spray painted, pastel dots and a pink-red hatched squared pattern below. White Wash highlights Dotson’s attraction to anime and cartoon-like imagery. Here, 3 young heroines have been painted in, only to be washed out with a swooping white mark that traverses the canvas left to right.

Johnny Mullen’s abstract paintings visually fold over themselves as paint takes on an illusory depth. In his work, Untitled (Blue Defacer), Mullen uniquely renders brushstrokes as overlapping planes. In the white background, residues of red and yellow streak and smear around the edges. Using a limited palette, his work is graphic and painterly all at once.