Jackie Tileston: Field Trip

November 5th - December 31st, 2021

Jackie Tileston Zg Gallery, 300 West Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60654 T. 312.654.9900 I www.ZgGallery.com

Field Trip

Field Trip Zg Gallery is pleased to present Jackie Tileston’s solo exhibition Field Trip. Her new paintings and works on

paper are driven by Tileston’s exuberant embrace of color, a

belief in abstraction as a vehicle for enticing the viewer into unknown territories, and an immersion into non-dual philosophies that see everything in the cosmos as meaningful and exquisite. Atmospheric clouds and liquid

pours host clusters of almost baroque islands of activity that are all seemingly in various states of emergence and

dissolution. Ominous blacks are juxtaposed with luminous pinks, graphic moments hover over puffs of pigment.

Multiplicity, hybridity, and free range thinking and play create worlds within worlds.

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48 x 60"

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48 x 60"

Notes for Field Trip

Growing up in five countries before college as a “Third Culture Kid” meant belonging everywhere and nowhere, and this has defined my sense of place in the world, my perspective on culture, and my identity. Inhabiting a singular identity – culturally, spiritually, or aesthetically – was not an option for me, and so instead I became interested in the freedom of things to cross boundaries, be adapted and transformed in an infinite state of flux.

I see my work as a visual version of speculative fiction, one with open-ended narratives and perspectives and a multiplicity of codes and connections, like an atlas of boundaries between the knowable and the imagined, or a continuously expanding visual encyclopedia. Imagination is the engine of change, and it is how artists conjure possible futures and ways of being.

I use abstraction as an invitation to be receptive to the unseen, to encourage the viewer towards slowness and away from naming. Abstraction can suspend the viewer in that space of unknowing for just a little longer.

In Taoist painting, form emerges out of Absence, alternating with Presence in gorgeous, hilarious, complicated bursts of cosmological stuff – atoms, mud pies, peacock spiders, black holes, the confetti of wavelengths, etc. The Taoists consider all the stuff of the world “ornaments of existence”, and painting enacts the emergence from the Field, the Cosmos in microcosm.

There is an almost untranslatable word in Sanskrit, “chamatkara”. It means something

like wonder and aesthetic rapture at the astonishing beauty of the inherent Pattern of existence, akin to the Greek “Logos.” In this state the deepest structures of reality and all it contains are perceived as inherently beautiful. In Abhinava Gupta’s non-dual aesthetic theory from the 11th century, the “nine flavors of beauty” (rasas) include the heroic, mind-blowing, emotive, comedic, wrathful, erotic, disgusting, terrifying, and peaceful.

Nothing is left out.

Field Trip