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THE WAY OF THINGS: JANE FOX HIPPLE
IMAGE: Jane Fox Hipple, The Way of Things, 2012, installation view.
Photo: Carly Gaebe		 HI-RES
On View: June 28 — August 10, 2012
Reception: June 28, 2012   6-8pm
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DODGEgallery is pleased to present The Way of Things, an exhibition of new work by Jane Fox Hipple. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery.

Through both physical and figurative layers, Hipple approaches her paintings as a foil for ideas of totality, integration and completion. As no single work can illuminate all that Hipple wishes for her viewer, she creates entire exhibitions that move piece to piece allowing greater connections and strands of thought regarding both contemporary painting and the individual. Her paintings seek both a physical and psychological relationship with the viewer through their play of materials and form; she often layers her paintings in smooth loose strokes but then abruptly breaks that movement with an quotidian object causing the viewer to become aware of the act of looking.

Washing layer upon layer of thin paint, Hipple draws to mind abstract expressionism and color field painting of the 50’s and 60’s. But she consistently breaks from this tradition, employing the notion of the every day by incorporating Q-tips, sheetrock, duct tape, a bed sheet as either part of the piece or the literal surface itself. Hipple divides the face, exposes the structure and toys with color choices as a means to alter the dominant spaces within painting.

Hipple writes,
I am democratic in my incorporation of materials as a way of equalizing all things, in order to discover what / if any transformative potential can be found. This work is a visual display of my argument about whether to find meaning in the hard space of the physical and psychological time, or in an internal realm that is less comfortable to navigate and difficult for me to address verbally. The pressure on the physical boundaries of the rectangle acknowledges a beyond, yet the fact that each work more or less adheres to the rectilinear suggests a comfort in confinement.

Creating “interventions” in the rectangle by highlighting structural elements and breaks in the surface, Hipple alludes to a self-consciousness in the act of painting. Supporting Role highlights a single fluorescent yellow screw that holds the painting off the wall in the bottom left-hand corner. Hipple teases the viewer as the screw enacts its obvious “supporting role” and yet, by virtue of its very color, wants to be the “star”. The painting itself depicts a washy faint dark rectangle contained/framed by a lighter area of paint in portrait format; the more common conceit of a supporting role. Hipple contends with the modern notion of a supporting role, a character steeped in humility and failure that most reproach in order to be the star.

The Way of Things expresses a larger narrative for Hipple; each work flows into and out of the next allowing for a larger context of characters as in a novel or play. She draws in her viewer by means of visual lightness and pleasing abstraction but upon closer inspection the works unfold and the compositions become individuals in a greater whole that demand the viewer explore the contradictions within.