from: notebook drawings and notations > James Fuentes Online > July 15–August 15, 2020
from: notebook drawings and notations >  James Fuentes Online > July 15–Sept.1, 2020

James Fuentes is pleased to present from: notebook drawings and notations, a project by Jessica Dickinson. This exhibition brings together thirty-seven notebook drawings made by Dickinson during New York City’s stay at home orders due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Since 2003, Dickinson’s notebook drawings and writings have functioned as poetic scripts for the structure and process for individual paintings. These new drawings however assemble a distinct series on their own, marking integers during this specific historical period of processing sudden change, isolation, resilience, and collective interdependence. The exhibition’s title “from” designates the making-within-and-out-of a certain place, space, and point in time. Reductive and immediate, the drawings give form and language to durational shifts in perception, feeling, and thinking in the peripheries of lived and embodied spaces. Removed from drawing books, the tension between restrained forms and the central seam bring attention to their fragility, while indicating the intimacy of the book form as their source. Each drawing is directed by writing on its reverse side. These sparse observations of emotions and situations, fleeting light, color, shadow, and pattern, gather and give matter to a space for reflection.

Dickinson’s practice is centered around dense atmospheric abstract paintings that explore shifting experiences of time, perception, matter, and consciousness. Optical and tactile, minimal and baroque, restrained yet generous, they offer space for the labor and process of paying attention. Making only four paintings a year, her ongoing drawing projects - notebook drawings, traces, works on paper, and remainders - extend these ideas through their own particular materialities and modalities. The notebook drawings, and writing that accompany them, have the distinct role as part of the source material for Dickinson’s paintings.

This is the first project dedicated to Dickinson’s notebook drawings and writing. Both front and back of the drawings are displayed online. Accompanying the exhibition is an ebook of the drawings in chronological sequence to experience the work in book form.