It is said that “with great freedom comes great responsibility.” Over the years, this anecdote pops up whenever I am in the company of abstract art. For me, abstraction in painting, in spite of its promise of unlimited freedom, is the most difficult genre to capture, hold, and move a viewer. Painting can be anything, of course, but abstract painting has distilled the practice into an unintentional constraint of color and mark making. An energetic visual gestalt of vibration and movement that can express anything.
In To Beat Water, Upper Market Gallery has brought together three active local Bay Area abstract painters to vibrate and play together in a single white cube space. Upper Market Gallery is a destination gallery off the beaten “gallery stroll” path, but their program is consistently strong and rewards those who make it a haunt. To Beat Water is no exception. This show is an intimately curated exhibition of three painters whose work has been in dialogue with each other for some time. What awaits the viewers is a profoundly visceral investigation of the metaphysical and energetic impressions of lived experience.
Coming out of a recent show at Strike Slip Gallery in San Francisco, Katie Seifert makes another bold statement in To Beat Water. Returning to and leaving behind points of reference experienced in the material world, which are mere departure locations, scrying bowls if you will, to a world of dazzling spirit that dances and resounds with energy. Her experience as a doula, with its direct entry into liminal portals of multiverse, Seifert became increasingly more aware of those spaces in other moments and experiences. Generous in expressive strokes, Siefert’s work is an investigation of a more ethereal, darting sense of place. Her process is an active dialogue with the work, always searching through that exchange as she reaches for an aliveness that will pull the viewer in. In her words, the result is a “hyper-intense presence within the natural world.”
In a different approach altogether, Kelly Jean Egan begins with foregrounded personal experiences and then surrenders herself to an interior contemplative process until a sense of color and composition of the deeply felt moment is revealed. After a lifetime of experimenting with various techniques and styles, including realism, and managing tattoo studios in Brooklyn and South Africa, she moved into a series of heavily textured landscapes. Then, in 2020, while living in pandemic lockdown on the otherworldly island of Malta, she began developing her current technique. In a unique studio process, she intentionally applies paint to a surface, referencing those palettes and configurations. Then placing a plexiglass “lid” over the paint like a planchette on a Ouija Board, she guides the sheet to arrive at the final expression of the subject. -no brushes, no knives! The work is as performative as it is descriptive. Seeing the work is believing. Part Rorschach Test, part practiced skill, the works are frozen meringues of liberating movement and emotional release.
Rachel Dwan offers a new and different entry point to perception from her previous bodies of work. In To Beat Water, Dwan’s work is more stabilized, zoomed in, as she examines more local space as opposed to the more fluid, expansive rhythms of flat color we saw in the last couple of years. These smaller, intimate compositions nod to O’Keefe in subject, palette, and subtlety, but take the investigation deeper. Dwan leaves behind the subject in favor of a closer look at the intersections and shapes that suggest grander compositions of abstract environments that have a weather of forces all their own. In a microcosm that mirrors the macrocosm, these compositions often reflect topographic maps or drawings of tectonic plates. The shapes press against each other and the four sides of the surface, creating dynamics that beg to be enjoyed repeatedly as the eye enjoys their circular and harmonious relationships.
In To Beat Water, we are reintroduced to three committed painters who approach abstraction with intentionality and spontaneity in relationship to one another. The choice to juxtapose these particular individual artists in a single curated space, highlights the scope of abstraction’s appeal, and the limitless nuance of its languages. Separately, each artist’s body of work asserts a very personal gravitas that collectively holds a synergistic balance in the room. Together there is a parlance of distinct vernaculars that inspire new insights and appreciations of the genre. —Grey Dey
Grey Dey, currently an MFA candidate at UIUC, is a painter who has exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Provincetown for the past 20 years
TO BEAT WATER
Katie Seifert, Kelly Jean Egan, & Rachel Dwan
Upper Market Gallery, San Francisco, February 21-23
Opening Reception, February 21st, 6 - 9 PM
