If you are in the Dallas area we highly suggest heading over to the Holly Johnson Gallery this Saturday from 5-8pm for the opening reception of Instructions for Dissolution, works by PennDesign's Jackie Tileston. From the Holly Johnson Gallery press release:
Jackie Tileston's paintings are heterotopic spaces in which diverse strategies and nomadic thinking create complex images that investigate the contemporary sublime and states of being. Tileston (b. Manila, Philippines) spent her childhood as an itinerant "Third Culture Kid", living in the Philippines, India, England, and France, before moving to the US. This intercultural mix and sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere has become the template for making abstract, visionary paintings. She has developed her own pictorial vocabulary and symbolism, a semiotics that incorporates references to an eclectic variety of sources: geometric yantras, fragments of Ukiyo-e prints, fractals, digital photos, Chinese landscape, quantum physics, Western Romanticism, and patterns from around the world all feed the work. Tileston creates hybrid, layered and contemplative spaces that explore ways to materialize the ephemeral through exuberant, grotesque, raucous, and baroquely differentiated forms.
Tileston most often works over a background of raw linen coated with traditional sizing. She masters atmospheric, misty washes that emulate J.M.W. Turner's ecclesiastic skies and sets these to drift across the picture plane, over which she superimposes bouquets of multi-colored liquid fireworks of unknown hybrid shapes that float and orbit in nebulous chromatopias.
The works included in Instructions for Dissolution embody her long-term devotion to yoga and meditation, as well as questioning how these ideas can be manifested visually, and what the social and political implications are. In a recent interview, Tileston said "The practices allow me to continuously regroup and reframe my experiences in the world according to something saner and more ecstatic than I might otherwise have access to. I read a lot of yoga/tantra philosophy, and it definitely aligns with the ideas that are important to me in the studio - how things are made manifest through some sort of intelligent creative process, and then undergo dissolution in a continual process of change and evolution...Ongoing questions about the real and unreal, a commitment to some sort of celebration of what is here in our experience and also beyond, the totality and incomprehensibility and sheer weirdness of it all."
Expand Image
