Patrick Dean Hubbell “Every Day. Every Night.”

Candice Madey

[Image: Patrick Dean Hubbell "As the Day Ends, And The Sun Sets, Your Warmth Carries Us Forward" (2023) (detail), Oil, acrylic, enamel, charcoal, oil pastel on canvas, wood stretcher bar, 78 x 78 in.]

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CANDICE MADEY presents Every Day. Every Night., a solo exhibition by Patrick Dean Hubbell, his first with the gallery. Exploring the manifestations of intuitive and organic mark making and the transfiguration of materiality, Hubbell’s new paintings comprise multiple cut and sewn canvases that are hung in layers or stretched on a diagonal in a process that investigates the realm between painting, sculpture, and figuration.

While abstract in form, the works bear titles that allude to the natural world and phenomenological experiences of temperature, light, and time of day or season. Recurring symbology such as chevrons, crosses, and diamond forms, references aspects of Diné cultural philosophy. Fusing the notion of an organic, geological ground with traditions of geometric abstraction, Hubbell both rejects and employs historically divergent strategies of art and craft making, operating in a more personal, interstitial space between cultural dichotomies. His work exhibits all the component parts of painting—stretcher bars, fabric supports, and oil or acrylic paint—deconstructed and presented in a manner that evokes blankets, fringed shawls, or ceremonial robes. Hubbell cites the influence of Indigenous ceremonial lifeways on the work, intimating the potential for spiritual embodiment or utilitarian function.

Hubbell’s studio practice includes the collection, processing, and integration of natural earth pigments from his ancestral homelands on the Navajo Nation. With this subtle gesture, he upends the notion of “place making” art—acknowledging the subjective interpretation of nature, time, and place, and foregrounding the living, breathing nature of the substrate.

Patrick Dean Hubbell (Diné, b. 1986) received his BFA in 2010 from Arizona State University and his MFA in 2021 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is originally from Navajo, New Mexico, located near the Northeast region of the Arizona-New Mexico border of the Navajo Nation. He is To’ahaní (Near to Water Clan), Born for Dibe’lizhini (Black Sheep), Maternal Grandfather is Kinyaa’aanii (Towering House People), Paternal Grandfather is Hona’ghaahnii (One Who Walks Around Clan).

Hubbell’s work has been exhibited at galleries, museums, and institutions nationally and internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at Nina Johnson, Miami, FL, and Gerald Peters Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM. His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including those of the Denver Art Museum, CO, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL. He is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2017), New Artist Society Award (SAIC, 2019), and the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship (SAIC, 2021). He lives and works on the Navajo Nation.