Night Gallery is delighted to present Tomashi Jackson: Minute By Minute, on view from September 30 through November 4, 2023. Returning to her hometown of Los Angeles, California, Minute By Minute marks Jackson’s fifth career solo exhibition and her second at Night Gallery. Tomashi Jackson utilizes research methodologies to visually represent site-specific issues within public and private spaces, shedding light on their impact on individuals and communities alike. Her creative process draws from a rich array of sources, including archival materials, historical documents, and personal stories, which she weaves together to create a compelling dialogue between past and present. Minute By Minute examines themes of high contrast — visualizing isolation and connection, grief and renewal, through paintings that deeply resonate with contemporary cultural and societal dynamics. The exhibition's title is inspired by The Doobie Brothers’ 1978 album Minute By Minute, which served as an emotive soundtrack to numerous tender moments shared between the artist and her late mother, Aver Marie Burroughs. This ten-track recording remains a poignant sensory memory for Jackson, conjuring recollections of enjoying music with her mother while growing up in Mid-City Los Angeles during the 1980s and 1990s. The physical compact disc — given to Jackson from her mother’s own encyclopedic music collection of vinyl, CDs, and tapes in 1998 — was a parting gift to commemorate the artist’s move from L.A. to the San Francisco Bay Area to begin art college. It is now one of the few tangible heirlooms in Jackson's possession following her mother’s death in 2021. In the exhibition, ten new paintings take their titles from the album’s song list and incorporate six of her mother's photographs of trees, tree bark, leaves and branches taken in Bakersfield, California, during the height of the COVID-19 isolation in December 2020, two months before she passed away. The images were extracted from the last memory card used in Burroughs's digital camera. Six studies of trees are transformed into 45-degree and 135-degree halftone lines and composed to interact with Jackson’s halftone-lined pictures of six social gatherings she has attended between November 2022 and August 2023 (halftones are produced for printmaking processes, changing photography into individual lines or dots). These social gatherings include a small surprise celebration in a New York City apartment for her best friend’s end of chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer; the second night of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour in London; the wedding of two friends in Kenosha, Wisconsin; a Juneteenth street celebration in Five Points, Denver; a rooftop R&B dance party at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver for the artist’s first museum survey exhibition; and a front row view of Parliament-Funkadelic’s Farewell Tour performance at the Ogden Theater in Denver. Five of the new artworks are draped with clear PVC vinyl digitally printed with colored halftone line translations of Burroughs’s three digital photographs of leaves and branches. Five of the new works employ shallow maple and walnut wooden awnings, an attachment for exterior architecture designed to provide partial shelter from weather, as supportive structures for paintings inside of the gallery. Jackson's exploration of materiality extends to symbolic site specificity. Eight of the works incorporate earthen materials embedded into the surfaces as thickly applied pastes made from Southern Colorado sand, Yule quarry marble dust from the Colorado mountain where the Lincoln Memorial was unearthed, and Pentelic marble dust from the Dionyssos quarry in Greece, the stone source for the all generational restorations of ancient Greek monuments. Experiences of togetherness in large numbers starkly contrasts with Jackson's nearly three years of total and partial social restriction due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the precautions taken to protect the immunocompromised person with whom she lived during that period. Lockdowns during the first two years of the public health emergency directly affected the artist's mother, who passed away from multiple undetected and untreated cancers on February 10, 2021, at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Hollywood, where Burroughs once worked as a unionized operating engineer. Her death is historically measured among excess deaths indirectly caused by the pandemic's disruptive influence on access to screening and treatment for people with life-threatening conditions other than COVID-19, or excess mortality due to pandemic-related consequences. “During January 26, 2020 - February 27, 2021, an estimated 545,600–660,200 more persons than expected died in the United States from all causes. The estimated number of excess deaths peaked during the weeks ending April 11, 2020, August 1, 2020, and January 2, 2021. Approximately 75%–88% of excess deaths were directly associated with COVID-19. Excluding deaths directly associated with COVID-19, an estimated 63,700 - 162,400 more persons than expected died from other causes.” [1] On July 17, 2023 The New York Times reported “the United States achieved a significant COVID-19 milestone by recording zero historically abnormal excess deaths,” marking a major positive turn since the pandemic's beginning in March 2020. This actuality and the unexpected long separations of families and communities between 2020 and 2023 serve as the haunting backdrop of Minute By Minute. The paintings activate Aver M. Burroughs’s last pictures shot in solitude and Tomashi Jackson’s pictures of events with people as reflections of social distance and long awaited reunion. These opposing realities have been and are being experienced by millions of people after three years of mass death and suspended regular physical contact for most people at some level on an international scale. As Jackson delves into the realm of global public health aberration amid the return to normalcy, she contemplates immersion in community in a post-pandemic isolation world. In this introspection, she acknowledges that beyond the depths of her grief lie opportunities for joy — found in embracing possibility, resonant music, and beauty in moments spent gathering with loved ones and new friends. — Kareema Thomas ____ Night Gallery is pleased to announce Repro, an exhibition of new work by Rose Marcus. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Rose Marcus carries one work she deems wanting more from each solo show to the next. During her last solo show with the gallery in 2019, Marcus displayed a series of works of a skyscraper under construction, breaking into the sky. One of the works presented, Eros, is a photograph of a construction worker at an open gate, heavily underexposed. The barely-there silhouette, a figure in a hard hat, becomes an archetype: a soldier, or a statue hardened into seductive contrapposto. In the artist’s forthcoming exhibition, titled Repro, the artist reproduces this image into a series of works. 
 Marcus responds to Eros through repetition and a contextualization of the figure into interior shots of construction sites where the jobs have long paused, perhaps been abandoned. Yet what remains in these spaces are the marks of robust physicality. The artist captures and then reenacts this physicality by integrating photography, printmaking, and painting. She prints photographs on canvas, makes copies, and allows chromatic aberration, blur, vignetting, screen moiré effects, and white balance inaccuracies to live in the work. Standard sizes of construction materials and systems for efficiency make repetition integral to all the actions that make buildings. But amid the work, in what is deemed a man’s world, are what the artist sees as hermaphroditic spaces overflowing with emotion, drawings, and paintings. Engineering sketches, calculations, chipping layers of paint, are beautiful works as-is, often dappled with graffiti, expressing the builders’ carnality. Our unconscious surfaces through slips of the tongue; here they are put on display. The photographs capture a dream-like space, a gallery of jokes, mistakes, and urgency left at rest. “Hey Santa define good” and “Pussies Everywhere” are found statements showing us how the id and the ego, thus desire and morality, are always underfoot when we make our buildings and get through our days. 
 In one group of works within the show, Marcus zooms into the drapery of the figure’s shirt in Eros. Repeatedly capturing the shirt’s folds, she follows the curvature and looseness of the fabric as some kind of portal into an inner world of abstraction. In parallel, imagery of plumbing repeats throughout the show, as anthropomorphic stand-ins for the body’s internal systems. Marcus wants you to go to the insides of these images, figures, and these spaces, and search, as if studying a sonogram, for more. In some works, Marcus paints directly on the printed canvas, connecting the work to the quick sketches and scrawl found on the walls. In others, she documents her paintings, prints them, and returns them back to us as photographs. The works rebut medium specificity while questioning documentation and the sterility of fine art photography. Marcel Duchamp, Harry Smith, Andy Warhol, Sherrie Levine, and Christopher Wool work with reproduction of their own art as its subject. Marcus’ mirrored imagery, layered references, and blatant use of the printer celebrate the possibility of a single image and the potential for expression inherent in its reproduction. Reproduction and repetition become a kind of repossession, where undertones of figures, fixtures, shadows, reflections, and double images sit right at the surface. Rose Marcus (b. Atlanta, GA, 1982) lives in New York. She received a BFA from Pratt Institute in New York and a Master’s in Art History at Hunter College, also in New York. Marcus’s solo exhibitions include Night Gallery (Los Angeles); Mary Mary (Glasgow); Know More Games (New York); Eli Ping (New York); David Peterson Gallery (Minneapolis); and And Now (Dallas). Her solo art fair presentations include Frieze London and Paris Internationale. Her work has shown in two-person exhibitions at Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta); Parisian Laundry (Montreal); La Kaje (Brooklyn); as well as group exhibitions at Modern Institute (Glasgow); Derosia (New York), Tanya Leighton (Berlin); Sies and Höke (Dusseldorf); Simon Lee Gallery (New York); and CANADA (New York). MaSS MoCa (North Adams) featured her work in 2016. Marcus's visual, curatorial, and performative work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, Cura, Architectural Digest, Mousse Magazine, Vogue, and Foundations Magazine. Marcus treats groundwork as intrinsic to her art practice; she became a certified full-spectrum doula in 2020 and serves women in need throughout New York City. Marcus’s art practice also includes curating, teaching, and writing. In 2010 and 2011, she founded and produced The Dependent Art Fair in New York, and has since spearheaded multiple curatorial endeavors. Marcus has published essays for the Theo Westenberger Foundation, ArtNews, Kunstmuseum Bonn, and DIS Magazine. She has self-published two books: Wits End and Technology is a Slow Job that Never Ends. She has held teaching positions at Cornell University in 2018 and Syracuse University in 2019. Marcus acted as curatorial consultant for a forthcoming exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art on the hermetic filmmaker Harry Smith. Her writing on Smith will be published in a forthcoming book titled Heaven and Earth Magic. Image: Rose Marcus