Amendments Dominic Chambers | Alexandre Diop | Wangari Mathenge November 13, 2021 – January 8, 2022 This exhibition brings together an inspired selection of artworks focusing on artists deconstructing history, experience, and perspective, and the dialogue around painting and identity through contemporary portraiture. --------------- Taylor White Invisible Cities November 13, 2021 – January 8, 2022 Seen together, these works, and this exhibition, are as close to a perfect harmony as a dissonant melody can be. Large-scale paintings are presented alongside more intimately scaled mixed-media work. Dominating, colorful abstraction gives way to found and imagined landscapes as though seen through windows or down rifle scopes. Each painting has a tough balance within itself. Multilayered pieces contain sociological determinations between industrial and rural, memory and nostalgia, identity and community. Alienation from society, loss of identity, and the loss of self are buried in the deeper parts. White’s landscapes are deeply complex. He simplifies complicated, expressionistic forms, reducing them to a compressed field of reference. Natural elements are almost eliminated, replaced instead by a rational approach to construction and proportions. Flat and lacking in perspective, his landscapes bridge purely abstract ideas with real spaces. In a striking motif, rifle-scope magnification lines demarcate off-center compositions, and create disturbing and intense conversations between subject, background, and surrounding negative space. There is a stylistic authenticity in his style reminiscent of Twombly’s graphic linework–specifically in the graffiti-like text across White’s paintings—and in emotional tension of Fontana’s rough—hewn, tangible materials. The exhibition takes its title from Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1971), which explores the fictional dialogues between traveler Marco Polo and emperor Kublai Khan. The stories outlined by those involved are familiar; in his telling of the discovery and conquest of diverse cities, Calvino’s encapsulates the ubiquity of all cities, or, the every city. Evoking this familiarity, White’s newest work makes direct reference to the militarization of American historical memory, specifically in the discovery of “new” lands and the consequences of such exploration.