SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Dolby Chadwick Gallery will present Some Quieter Melody, an exhibition of recent paintings by San Francisco–based artist Ian Kimmerly, on view throughout September. Confident brushstrokes, constellations of color, and figures rendered through fragments and repetition converge in Kimmerly's latest works, creating mesmerizing, layered compositions whose meanings emerge over time.
Kimmerly holds a sustained interest in the intricacies of human connection. A thread of intimate, familiar, and evocative depictions can be traced throughout his practice. In this body of work, he shifts his lens to the ruptures in our bonds, caused by economic and political systems that benefit from division, and to the meaning and beauty we create from our increasing fragmentation.
The exhibition title quotes Polish writer and activist Olga Tokarczuk. In her Nobel Lecture, The Tender Narrator, she argues for a “fourth-person” perspective—an antidote to the fragmentation of individual viewpoints—writing that “all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us.” Kimmerly’s paintings, when looked at with care, can unfold in this way: a range of elements, somehow resonating with each other, revealing deep, intimate connections over time. “Some quieter melody,” in Tokarczuk’s context, refers to the harmony we attempt to distill from the abundance of noise. It is in this flux of discordant sound, somewhere between all the notes and chords, where Kimmerly’s compositions—all possible stories and worlds of their own—sing the loudest.
The artist’s practice tacitly departs from the confines of traditional figuration, relying further on instinct and applications of abstraction. He has purposefully given his canvases a strong ephemeral quality for this exhibition. Changeable Like the Sea (2026), for example, portrays hidden faces diffused by what might be waves, winds, or even passages of time. The arrangement of visual elements suggests that something is in flux, while simultaneously insisting on the reality of what it depicts. What could be more precarious than a truth that exists only as an implication? It is this carefully sustained tension that lies at the heart of Kimmerly's work.
In More Facsimiles (2026), Mimicry (2025), and All Echoes (2025), Kimmerly revisits earlier thought investigations regarding plurality, questions of authenticity, and the anxieties of impermanence brought upon by technology and artificial intelligence. The artist draws attention to the feeling of uncertainty, represented in the blue hues and eerie attributes of the fragmented motifs. Interestingly, he also depicts elements of aid and balance in the form of the natural world: lush green fields, distant mountains, and bodies of water with imperfect symmetry—his own kind of remedy.
Like the Language Poets of the 1960s and 1970s, Kimmerly deconstructs existing art norms in favor of creating, not conveying, meaning through the use of his visual language. It is perhaps Kimmerly’s intention for each color, line, figure, and feeling to be anointed with our own interpretations. In Ian Kimmerly’s compositions, we contain multitudes.
Ian Kimmerly is a San Francisco-based artist who received an MFA from the University of Arizona and studied at the Academy of Fine Art and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. He has been an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center and the Santa Fe Art Institute and received a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. His work is featured in reviews by The San Francisco Chronicle, 7x7 Magazine, SF Weekly, and others.
