I had a chance to see Xylor Jane's exhibit this weekend at Canada gallery down in Chinatown. Ms. Jane was there herself which was a surprise and a little exciting. I first came across her work in an issue of ANP Quarterly, which is a free quarterly put out by RVCA. Her paintings develop based on mathematics and complex grids.
From the press release:
For this latest show the paintings plot the time period of our lives, marking the days and months that built the recent past (1960-80) and span several decades into the future. Each day is marked with a point of specific color. These colors are counted, hues are shifted and new systemic patterns are built and overlaid onto each painting. Illustrations of irrational number sequences (Pi or Phi), a run of prime or triangular numbers, and palindromic numeric sequences are drawn, overlaid, mirrored, and flipped. The conflation of autobiographical time and deep (geological) time, through the overlay of infinite number successions translate for Ms. Jane into the near death experience of each painting. An overt investment in pattern drives the paintings to a place where they fall from comprehension, and return to a visual tapestry of the absurd and sublime.
If you think the exhibit description is mind blowing you should see the paintings themselves. They are part optical illusion, part hypnotic, and part incomprehensible. My favorite ones had silver backgrounds and an almost imperceptible shift of pastel rainbow colors that when taken as a whole formed a pattern but up close seemed to almost disappear off the canvas. The sheer detail and repetitiveness of the canvasses was at times overwhelming to me. To say that her work is meditative is an understatement.
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