July 4 - August 4, 2024

Opening reception: Friday, July 6, 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Chance Encounters, our July show at Readymade Gallery, features a selection of works by nine artists: participants in the DNA residency this season along with invited guests. The title references the theme of chance connections and moments of happenstance which indelibly alter the trajectory of our lives. The liminal space of a coastal town provides the supporting structure and background for the show. The featured artists highlight intimate and random connections, which become more meaningful for their transiency.

Working from found photographs, Diana Jensen’s work captures the fleeting moments of connection put down to film. Her painting Stroll presents an overview of a place and time where encounters could happen, based on a vintage photograph of a crowded city square. Her painterly application of the blue ground is furthered by the translucency of the plexiglass support giving her paintings the dream-like, hazy quality of something half-remembered. The foreground fades into the background without a visible horizon to delineate space, just as the present fades into the past without any kind of temporal demarcation. 

Peter Hutchinson's photocollages create moments of joy and serendipity through their disparate collaged elements, juxtaposing images of landscapes, animals, and moments in time to create a patchwork narrative that meditates on the ethereal and physical, the personal and universal. His collage Butterflies presents a vista of mirrored, snow-capped mountains and dazzling butterflies resting on summer flowers. Through the medium of collage, Hutchinson depicts butterflies as large as mountains, with just as much import, while the sub-caption from my garden to the Alps reflects on interconnectedness of all things great and small, and the power of memory to collapse space and time. 

Dylan Hurwitz' paintings oscillate fluidly between depictions of bodies and depictions of landscape. Based on his explorations of the outermost cape observed through the last few years of DNA residencies, Hurwitz captures random sexual encounters with a nod to the idyllic utopia of Paul Gauguin, as well as the robust quality of African sculpture. James Horner's monochromatic, dreamlike portraits show men in moments of quiet rest. As well, he recreates selfies taken for a queer dating site - itself a space of spontaneous meeting - while his use of found materials such as belts and gloves creates a textural encounter between real and painted reality. Joshua Abelow, in his humorous, semi-cartooned portraits explores his personal interpretation of the self, depicting himself in profile with his tongue out and a beanie on his head. Dani Arnica presents quirky combinations of abstraction and heiroglyph, following recurring characters of a starman and a clockman as they wander through monochromatic space.  

Chance Encounters also addresses the mystery and risk of romantic encounter, and the anxiety inherent in moments of spontaneous connection. Community and a sense of belonging do not happen overnight, and to many it does not come easily, but the works represented here offer myriad avenues of solution and comfort, offering a vision of a more interconnected world.