DALLAS, TX.- Dallas Contemporary has announced details of its exhibitions for the new year, presenting solo exhibitions by Ross Bleckner and John Houck for the winter season from January through March 2017. Alongside Bruce Weber’s Far From Home (which remains on view since its opening last fall), the new exhibitions curated by Pedro Alonzo and Peter Doroshenko exemplify the institution’s ongoing commitment to bring top contemporary art from around the world to Dallas.

ROSS BLECKNER
Find a peaceful place where you can make plans for the future.
New York-based artist Ross Bleckner is known for painting a spectrum of subjects— from pulsating lines in his resurrection of Op art in the 1980s to the magnified cellular structures of autoimmune diseases in the 1990s and newer meditative works from the past few years.

Bleckner’s exhibition for Dallas Contemporary is his first major exhibition since his 1995 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The DC installation features both new large-scale paintings as well as recent smaller canvases, wherein according to the artist, “the architecture of place meets the architecture of the sky,” revealing phenomena of paint and light, in an oeuvre teetering between a call for salvation and a silent abyss.

It’s this philosophical query around the physical and the absent that animates Bleckner’s newest artworks. “The surface quality of the paintings,” he explains, “lets you look back into the world. It’s about the alchemy of the surface. The reality of it is somewhere in the paintings, but the configuration takes you away from that. There’s a tension between the materiality, the physicality, and the sublime.”

Central to the artist’s practice is a methodological layering of paint onto the canvas then scraping it away—a perpetual process of creating and editing, adding and subtraction. “I paint,” he explains, “the way one constructs a building.” He achieves a depth of color by slowly, gradually layering paint onto the canvas. The elimination of color is also central to Bleckner’s work. For example with his series of bird paintings, at one point in the creative process, the canvasses are entirely covered in paint—until Bleckner carves the birds out of the layers of paint. “So the birds are not actually there on the canvas. They are literally gone.”

Born and raised on Long Island, Bleckner is a native New Yorker who splits his time between the city and the country, between creative urban settings and the quiet serenity of the Long Island shore. He studied at New York University, where he now teaches. Bleckner’s paintings are a reflection of a critical engagement with political aesthetics of contemporary New York City. Several of his works are in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum.

The exhibition is curated by Peter Doroshenko, Executive Director of Dallas Contemporary.

JOHN HOUCK
The Anthologist
John Houck is deeply interested in the dialectic between repetition and desire in contemporary technological culture. In recent years, Houck has pursued this enquiry beyond the studio through psychoanalytic therapy, an exercise in remembering, which remains one of the only acts of daily life that eschews capitalism and is a means to disrupt photographic repetition. Houck found that affecting memories is more about activating the imagination than recalling facts and data. The necessity of imagination in reminiscing is apparent across his works, invoked by layered visual puzzles and often through subject matter as well.

His newest body of work reflects on material relics that signify the artist’s interpersonal relationships. Objects and pictures serve as surrogates of the specific nuances of the intimate and psychic space shared between two individuals, or in psychoanalytic terms, the dynamic ‘third entity’. Houck further draws a metaphoric parallel to the interstitial third entity between painting and photography by incorporating playful and irreverent strokes of paint within the photos. Subsequent iterations of rearrangement and re-photography create spatially layered images that evoke the complexity and malleable nature of memory, and show how objects laden with personal histories can drive the imagination and inspire new narratives.

The work builds on previously explored processes, in which objects gifted to the artist by his parents and friends are similarly subjected to a rigorous process of arrangement and photography. The series addresses how we make models of our world to better understand it, and how those models become and then alter our perceptions of the world — how the tools we create in turn create us.

The tension in Houck’s work — ranging from early construction of hobby-kit-styled model drones, to coordinates systems mapped onto landscapes, and in carefully hand-folded grids with the Aggregates series — has been the simultaneous resistance to and embrace of technology. His advanced training in programming and architecture allows for a unique position from which he undermines the tools of the trade for his own exploratory means. As a photographer, Houck departs from the monocular vision inherent to the photographic apparatus, forcing a collapse of spatial and temporal relationships within a single image.

Furthermore, Houck finds creative potential in the inkjet printer, rather than the camera itself, defining his technical site of production as the split between the two. The controlled scientific process is complemented by an intentional schism such as a simple fold, repeated layers of imagery, multiple perspectives or disconcerting shadows that appear throughout the work. The result is mesmerizing: printed imagery that pulls the viewer into the picture, demanding inspection between what is real and what is perceived as real.

John Houck (b. 1977) received his MFA from UCLA, Los Angeles, CA and a BA in Architecture from Colorado University, Boulder, CO. He participated in the Whitney Independent Study and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture programs. His work is in several prominent museum and private collections including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Palm Springs Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The exhibition is curated by Pedro Alonzo, Adjunct Curator at Dallas Contemporary