ONE THING AND THE OTHERS, JUDITH DEAN

On the bus ride to Bodenrader art gallery, I saw the torn remnants of wheatpasted posters wrapped around traffic poles. At a light, I watched paint flakes flutter off the legs of bridges. Walking from the stop, I passed plywood spray-painted with construction workers’ ciphers and symbols. The gallery floor itself also left marks of what came before: one of the partners (Hi, Peter!) explained how it used to be an architecture firm, and there was scuff and sunfade on the wood floor from the tables and desks that used to fill the space. I was going to the gallery because Judith Dean’s paintings reminded me of these public art sites. I love how you can read the story of a wall in the layers of paint that compete for the space. The black paint haphazardly rolled over graffiti, the patches of neon still peaking through. All paintings carry their own history, but Dean’s leave the process of their creation exposed. Many of the paintings feature images warped along perspective lines to create rooms like DOOM corridors. These spaces remind me of Magritte’s On the Threshold of Liberty, but while the images that filled Magritte’s walls read as windows into never-before-seen other worlds, Dean’s rooms are filled with easily traceable images. The leaflet written for the exhibition explained that Dean sourced these images from the Wikimedia Commons, getting multiple unrelated images from simple searches that continue to share space in the paintings. These rooms are layered atop backgrounds that seem to have been scraped, bled, and spilled across the canvases. Dean worked some of the paintings to near-completion before restretching them into larger, trapezoidal shapes, leaving her rooms floating in space. These methods further disorient the plane of the painting, creating the sense that there are competing forces at work. Blank walls go up, tagged walls go down. The paintings are both dying and struggling to be born.

The subject of many of the paintings is perspective itself. If there’s one painting in the exhibition that taught me how to look at the rest, it’s Tomb, in which Dean has covered the canvas in brown except for a small box, an autumnal abstraction that acts as a glimpse into what lay beneath. There are four black lines drawn from the corners of this box to the corners of the canvas. With four lines, what was once a matter of two dimensions now bursts into a third! This box is no longer just paint beneath paint, but rather the bright door at the end of a hallway, or the open flaps of a cardboard box as seen from within. But representing perspective in its base form also lays bare the falsity of the technique. The illusion of perspective has been exposed. We are shown how the trick works, but knowing the method doesn’t ruin the fantasy; it makes the outcome fantastic in a new way. This is the Penn & Teller Principle. It’s doing the cups and balls with clear cups. 

The other great trick of these paintings is how they represent the internet without directly depicting it. Because what is the experience of using the internet nowadays, if not like entering a room made out of images that are constantly morphing and competing for attention? I’ll admit that before I thought of Magritte, I thought of Black Mirror’s 15 Million Merits, where people lived in a labyrinth of LED screens on every wall. Dean’s paintings offer a similar, less dystopian vision of the internet as a habitable space. It makes me think about how the internet, as advanced as it is, is still two-dimensional. The internet creates billions of unique perspectives for each of its users, yet our interfaces make it seem like our objective experiences are actually subjective. Everyone has a different internet, but you wouldn’t know it from how it looks. These paintings represent the experience of looking at the internet.  A few paintings even feature blotty black lines like floaters in your eyes. The paintings subsume new perspectives until they reach your own. The paintings ask, which perspective is truest? Whose perspective is in control? What does each perspective hide?

One Thing and the Others is on view at the Bodenrader gallery in Chicago until March 23rd. I suggest you visit.