Dana Powell “Smoke Screen”

James Fuentes LLC

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Allen & Eldridge presents the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Dana Powell, Smoke Screen.

Dana Powell’s small-scale representational paintings isolate banal objects and scenarios of the every day. Though their content is varied, each painting presents its precisely distilled subject using only the most essential means, letting formal qualities of color, light, and texture establish an evocative mood. Powell’s sparse compositions lend the viewer respite from the visual overload of our culture, providing a space for meditation.

Smoke Screen features Powell’s latest body of paintings, which were born of the restlessness and uncertainty the artist experienced after America’s recent election. Paintings of fire, smoke, and dark landscapes act both as highly identifiable icons and vague metaphors for broader themes of ruination, war, and deception.

In each of its thematic manifestations, Powell’s work dwells in the ambiguity of painting. Whether the work is a quaint swarm of mosquitos or a vacant road, her small canvases draw on the ability and responsibility of the medium to induce feelings of melancholy or euphoria, anxiety or tranquility.

Dana Powell (b. 1989) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her recent solo exhibitions include Closer Things, Sardine Gallery, Brooklyn, curated by Amy Feldman (2016); and Life Paintings, The Still House Group, Brooklyn (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Happy House, 79 Division St, New York (2017); The skies and the atmosphere most luscious, Allen & Eldridge, New York, curated by Dylan Kraus (2017); Return Policy, Howard St, New York (2016); and Shrines to Speed, Leila Heller Gallery, New York (2016). Dana Powell received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2015.