Sarah Brook Gallery is pleased to present French Lick, new paintings by Hannah Rose Dumes who lives and works in metro Detroit. This is Dumes’s debut exhibition in Los Angeles. The show consists of fifteen new works to which Dumes employs a tableaux of marks, an intricate layering of color and painterly touch, and an intuitive approach to imagery. Emerging from her canvases are expansive swathes of rich chroma alternating with solidity and brushiness. Straight cadmiums and rose madders abut acid or emerald greens; edges of white canvas peek through to introduce light and air. Dumes presents a full spectrum of color in each work, but relies on areas of reds and pinks to carry a romantic or bodily charge. Quarter Note, for example, depicts a ground of carnation pink anchored by two blue forms conveying radial symmetry, perhaps cornflowers, edging against a luminescent orange amoeba. Maze-like drawing fills the in-between space as though to evoke something schematic or embryonic, refusing the notion that these might be flower paintings. Dumes’s paintings originate from a bank of drawn motifs; she first uses sumi ink to arrange and repeat symbols amongst her paintings, working in a spirit of automatism. Her line work becomes varied, wonkier, through each iteration of drawing. A heavier bloom, a wider zag, a row of tooth-like shapes distinguish one painting from another and sit atop the painting surface so as to resist pictorial depth, like layers of graffiti accumulating on a subway ad. X’s and O’s could be deciphered, next to rendered, organic shapes that verge on a flower, fan, anemone or something cartoon-like. I see a boxing glove, you might see a cocoon. They resist thingness or clear definition, occupying a space alienated from rationality tinged with the psychedelic. The overall effect is ordered exuberance, a tight harmony created between disparate and brightly, energetic forms. The show’s title French Lick is playful, perhaps sexual innuendo, but a Midwesterner would rightly assume she’s referring to the town in Southern Indiana. Known for its hot springs, gambling, and Old Timey charm, French Lick conjures a certain resort luxury – think four poster beds, exaggerated drapes, fully stocked mini bars and views of verdant green, rolling hills. Dumes’s work feels rooted in places like this – pulling subconscious imagery guided by intuition or the hazy recollection of a past vacation or girlhood memory. The eclecticism contained in French Lick, Dumes’s desire to layer fragments of color and symbol, evokes a range of moods. These works assert the power of painting to contain events major and minor, to lead us away from the nameable, engender in us a spectrum of feelings and validate the impulse to search within. - Originally from Bloomington, Indiana, Hannah Rose Dumes received her BFA in printmaking and drawing from the Sam Fox School of Art and Design at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her MFA in printmaking from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she was the recipient of the University Fellowship. She has had solo exhibitions at Louis Buhl & Co, Detroit; Taymour Grahne Projects, London; Cuevas Tilleard Gallery, NYC; Egg Collective, NYC; and Frontrunner Gallery, NYC. She has been included in group exhibitions at Sarah Brook Gallery, LA; Reyes Finn, Detroit; 326 Gallery, NY; Taymour Grahne Gallery, NY; Galveston Artist Residency Gallery, TX; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery at Wayne State University, MI; Ida Schmid Gallery, NY; Black Ball Projects, NY; Tayuta Gallery, Tokyo; and Hunterdon Museum, NJ. Dumes lives and works in Metro Detroit, Michigan.