DAYTON, OH.- The Contemporary Dayton is presenting Gretchen Durst Jacobs: What the Body Carries, our latest Member’s Spotlight Exhibition that celebrates the vibrant creativity of our local and regional artist community. The exhibition features new work by Dayton-based artist Gretchen Durst Jacobs, presenting a body of encaustic monotypes that merge painting and printmaking to explore how experience is physically and emotionally held. Emanating from the body, the works use gesture, scale, and repetition to translate sensation, memory, and movement into abstract form. Throughout the exhibition, intuition and structure exist in dynamic balance, with grids often functioning as quiet frameworks that hold tension, rhythm, and emotional weight.
Each encaustic monotype is created through a process that uses hot wax and pigment transferred onto a surface, resulting in a singular, unrepeatable image. Through layered marks, color, and surface variation, the works invite viewers to contemplate how feeling takes shape—how emotion becomes visible through gesture, pattern, and material presence.
“My paintings and prints begin with the body,” says Durst Jacobs. “Rooted in somatic experience and attentive to the inner life, the work explores how feeling is carried, processed, and transformed through physical gesture.” Working at a scale that mirrors her own reach, each mark records movement, presence, and intuition. Grids enter the work as stabilizing forces, allowing chaos, memory, and motion to coexist within a shared structure.”
Although abstract, Durst Jacobs’s practice is grounded in more than twenty-five years of painting from direct observation. Her sustained engagement with landscape—its resilience, tenderness, and moments of tension—serves as a parallel to human experience. Through color, gesture, and layered marks, she approaches lived experience as a continuum, seeking to reconcile emotion with form and give shape to what cannot always be spoken.
All artworks in the exhibition are available for purchase, with proceeds supporting both the artist and TCD’s mission to connect artists and audiences through accessible, engaging contemporary art experiences.
Open to all current artist members, the Member’s Spotlight Exhibitions are an ongoing series that offers participants the unique opportunity to present a focused body of work in a solo exhibition. Each exhibition is installed in The T. Chase Hale & Jonathan A. Hale Gallery and remains on view for one month, opening with a public reception on the first Wednesday and continuing through the last Saturday of the month. These exhibitions not only highlight the diverse practices and perspectives of our members but also provide a professional platform for artists to gain visibility and engage directly with audiences. All artworks are available for purchase, with proceeds supporting both the artist and TCD’s mission to advance equity, diversity, and access through contemporary art. Participation in the Member’s Spotlight series is one of the many valuable benefits of being an artist member of TCD.
