TALK
Dana Frankfort and Jackie Gendel
June 6th - August 1st 2015
Tops Gallery is pleased to announce Talk, an exhibition of collaborative paintings by Dana Frankfort and Jackie Gendel.
Frankfort, best know for her expressive paintings of words, and Gendel, best known for her figurative paintings of oblique dramas, share an interest in the painterly articulation of social interaction and utterance.
The paintings in Talk were created over the past year with Frankfort and Gendel mailing canvases between their respective studios in Austin and New York. Each artist had the task to paint over the other's work and accept both the risk and surprise inherent in such collaboration.
Befitting an era of surplus communicative and locative technologies with their occasioning of data-producing interaction, and their attendant and obligatory opportunities for banter (and possibly the stagflation of language as social currency), these two painters have chosen to collaborate along the semiotic and narrative theme of "talk". Be it written or phatic speech, stuttering or smooth, confession, gossip, getting disconnected, or dropped calls, body language or miscues, the question of where one's self begins and ends is defined against where another ends and begins. Intentionality is never lost, or even the point. In painting as in language, it's not simply that what is said or seen is what it means; it's how it's said or seen that it means. Anything. Whatever....
