TEXT BY MICHAELA MULLIN | VIEW IMAGES 

The New Year has arrived—it’s finally 2021, and so much is already happening. We at Moberg Gallery hope to offer viewers poignant moments and self-reflective portals with our inaugural exhibit of the year, Contemporary Women Paint: Abstract Expressions. Our viewers may remember the stunning paintings of many of these painters— Johanne Brouillette, Dana James, Conn Ryder, Daniela Schweinsberg, and Alayne Spafford—all of whom have new works included. In addition, Denver-based artist, Alyson Khan, showing with Moberg Gallery for the first time, has seven new pieces.

These six artists master the expressive work and play of a/morphousness—making marks in order to sometimes loosen and lose shape. Their forms draw and shatter boundary, and with that, also explode physical and psychical elements, energies. Their use of color exposes de/lineation that warps two-dimensional space in the way speed might warp in its representation. Contemporary Women Paint: Abstract Expressions comes at the perfect time of augmented space in warping times.

Alyson Khan uses thick lines, creating reinforced geometric spaces in “Bubble Gum Mystic,” “Interdimensional Fishing Trip 1 & 2,” “Revisiting the Monster Again,” and “Self Psycho Analysis Session 1 & 2 & 4.” Her compositions are collaged yet orderly—seemingly with ‘everything in its place.’ Reminiscent of building blocks from childhood, and also the very core two-dimensional building blocks of drawing and painting—lines and dots, circles and parallelograms, and the hyper-psychological triangle. Shapes get cut, overridden, obfuscated, and exposed. Khan’s color palette is cool, which allows for slices of warmth.

Conn Ryder’s new acrylic works on canvas: “Fustercluck,” “Grin and Bear It,” “Over the Moon,” “Sucker Punch,” and “The Jig is Up,” are celebratory and cathartic. Her work feels gorgeously wild and visceral, with an objective of subjecting one to life, with all its vicissitudes—to activate self and other. Because body, whether subject or not, is all relationship. And mind is mining. And the muscle that beats out everything else, is, without the body/mind unity, simply a contained splatter. But with it, paintings of effusion become strange images of new jacaranda species and pyrotechnics, from up in the tree or inside the work of fire. 

Alayne Spafford uses acrylic, oils, and collage for the three mixed media works on canvas: “End of the Road,” “Let’s Get Going,” and “Sometimes There Is A Rainbow.” Asymmetrical color ‘patches’ are polygons pieced together into geodesic and slightly anthropomorphic compositions. Beneath the top layer of paint, one can see textual elements, cryptic readings that need only the viewer to fulfill the roll of cipher. Spafford’s paint ‘patches’ clearly delineate as an aerial map, each whole abstract ‘subject’ an island of sorts, its curvilinear contour full of interior sharpness.

Dana James’ works, “Voyeur” and “Sequestered,” are created with oil, pigment, acrylic, and ink. They are sweeping color fields, quietly sectioned. Adjacency is their brilliant composition, creating floorplan-like space in “Sequestered,” not railroad or shotgun, but bungalow, in pink and yellow, neon orange irradiating with cerulean blue’s scintillators. And this evocation of the beautiful and toxic, though in more pastels, continues in “Voyeur,” which intimates a chemical reaction, reminiscent of an un- or underdeveloped polaroid.

The movement in Johanne Brouillette’s four works— “Finding Courage,” “Finding Hope,” and “Finding Joy I & II”—feel like choreographed dance, slowed, so that in their movement, figuration appears. The thin striping lines like drips or strings move separately, but touch. In rhythm with itself, the main abstract interests work from a centralized (though compositionally off-center) core, where color and form meet, where the viewer’s eye is drawn to intertwining—an embrace in motion, the tightest one being that of red and black in her “Joy” paintings.

The colors in Daniela Schweinsberg’s works, “Somewhere in Paradise,” “Carnival,” and “You Promised Me Roses,” make place—furiously joyful (even if somewhat lamenting) place. Roadways, waterways, sunrays, airwaves, female folds and tiptoeing in wind—these ideas manifest and travel us to themes of love, fun, apical living, and potential destinies. Emerging through strokes of intimate fluidity, paint and emotion, in Schweinsberg’s hands, engage in an inextricable jig.

This exhibit is a performance and show of power; it releases, reveals, makes new and fortifies the world with intellect and emotion. Don’t miss viewing and feeling the intensity and calm, and its massive loco-motive berth, built just for our temporary mooring. Contemporary Women Paint: Abstract Expressions is only our first hurrah of 2021. Enjoy the virtual exhibit at moberggallery.com, come in during business hours, or make an appointment to view it ‘face to space,” before its closing on March 20. Chris Vance’s exhibit of new works opens April 2.

View and purchase works on mobergshop.com

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