Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York is pleased to announce an exhibition of exciting new work by Susan Dory. Vision Division features sculptural work alongside vibrant, large-scale acrylic paintings that explore complex geometries of divided space and color.
Dory delves into new media with hanging sculptures, bas-reliefs, and painting collages. She draws inspiration from her own preliminary paintings, originally created to work out certain concepts, palettes or techniques. Re-envisioning these pieces as raw material, Dory deconstructs and reassembles the canvases. Pieces of painted canvas are cut, looped, overlaid, and sewn onto colorful climbing ropes. The sculptures, suspended at the end of these lines, are at once structured and organic, appearing familiar yet enigmatic. Similarly, the painting collages and bas-reliefs investigate concepts of fragmentation and reconstruction in new depths.
In her paintings, Dory continues to employ a complex process of layering paint and color. Her diverse palette of both natural and synthetic hues is more saturated than previous series, and the opaque layers are distinctly divided. She creates vibrantly fractured geometric paintings inspired by politically gerrymandered maps, in which the majority party re-draws voting districts in an intensely surgical way to favor their party. Some of the shapes are lifted directly from maps; others are created by Dory herself as she considers the separation of territories and the resulting abstractions in the world.
The large-scale paintings provide balance to the smaller, more domestic scale of the sculptural pieces. The separate processes evolve from and inform each other, coming together to form a whole, like a composition in three movements. The works in Vision Division contain an element of meticulous planning as well as play. Dory embraces uncertainty in a time of social and political upheaval, exploring the beautiful visual subtleties in cast-off works and in the media we consume. In a series that examines seemingly bleak concepts of division and disconnection, there is an underlying curiosity, optimism, and ultimately, wholeness.
Susan Dory was born in Oklahoma City, OK and currently works and resides in Seattle, WA. She studied at the Iowa State University in Ames, IA where she received a Bachelor’s of Arts. Dory has received both national and local awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the Willard R. Espy Foundation Artist-In-Residence Fellowship and the Behnke Foundation’s Neddy Artist Fellowship. Dory’s works have been featured in The Seattle Times, Art in America and Blouin Art Info.
