HOLLY JOHNSON GALLERY

DAVID AYLSWORTH
The Sun is as Big as a Yellow Balloon

September 7 – November 9, 2024

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to present The Sun is as Big as a Yellow Balloon, an exhibition of new paintings by David Aylsworth, while also marking the artist’s seventh solo show with the gallery. The exhibit opens Saturday, September 7, with a reception from 5 – 7 pm and continues through November 9.

David Aylsworth is an abstract painter who, throughout his career, has deftly embraced ambiguity in the painterly process. Characterizing his painting as purely nonobjective, however, is not exactly right. In this new body of work, the artist captures the awe of bearing witness to environments both real and imagined through the sensory experience of the picture plane. Overlapping forms and wide expanses hint at the landscape with vast horizon lines to suggest receding space. His choice of color – noticeably not naturalistic – plucks the viewer from the landscape and returns them squarely to the formalist qualities of oil on canvas.

The artist has spent years cultivating his process – approaching his paintings with instinct and curiosity. His compositions unfold without a premeditated study as a continuous cycle of actions and reactions. The seeming nonchalance radiating from his shapes and palette is in fact a purposeful irreverence. Imperfection is embedded in his method, as edges are never quite smooth, colors are scumbled or applied wet-on-wet, and surfaces expose thinly veiled revisions.

Regarding the exhibition’s title and many of his painting’s titles, Aylsworth recently elaborated, “My titles are mostly from show tunes which have meant something personal to me. Most people I know do not listen to this kind of music as often as I do, so I feel in a way that I have personal ownership of it. I admire how lyricists craft words to match the music, and I make spaces in the paintings that in my mind are largely theatrical. The lyrics allow me to express emotions that I cannot express in another way. Words frame images in my paintings in the way that they give form to the music that I enjoy. I also like it when the lyrics seem to not have a direct relationship to the painting, so the title can add another dimension beyond the painting itself.”

Art historian Sandra Zalman, Ph.D. writes about Aylsworth’s work, “Where there are brushstrokes, drips, clotting, and scraping, this process if foregrounded. But it is also evident in the most discursive way that shapes coalesce to articulate a larger story of mediation – the fine line between form and figure, or plane and ground, which speaks to the very human quality of fining opportunity in uncertainty, near connections, qualifications, and do-overs. The painting may play, and tease, and flirt, but their force derives from the quiet, unassuming way they confront these larger concerns.”

Aylsworth earned a BFA from Kent State University (1989) and was a Core Fellow Resident of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1989-1991). His paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Dallas Museum of Art; the El Paso Museum of Art; and the Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi. Aylsworth was the subject of a ten-year survey, Either/And, organized by the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX, and traveled to the Galveston Arts Center (2017). His paintings were also included in Painting: A Love Story at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2014) and Working in the Abstract: Rethinking the Literal, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2011). Additionally, many articles about his work have been published in noteworthy publications such as ArtLies, Art in America, The Dallas Morning News, and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Aylsworth lives and works in Houston, Texas.

JACKIE TILESTON
JUST THIS

June 22 – September 28

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Jackie Tileston: Just This, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper. An opening reception will be held June 22, from 5:00 -7:00 p.m. The exhibition continues through September 28.

In the artist’s most recent work, her practices in yoga and meditation, trance techniques and entheogenic experiences are converging in new experimental and conceptual processes based in automatic drawing. The paintings and drawings function as topographic energy maps of unknown realms, expressions of cosmic play, or the visual equivalent of sound waves emerging from a field of potential.

In the nondual traditions of ancient India, Consciousness is understood to be the fundamental of the universe from which everything arises. One field of blissful Awareness vibrates and separates into infinite loci of diverse individual perspectives, and the manifest universe is thus the result of ecstatic emanations from this unified field.

Tileston asks whether what she calls “deep perceiving” can catalyze the experience of non-ordinary states of consciousness, and can these experiences help to evolve new paradigms of interconnectedness?

Jackie Tileston (b. Manila, Philippines) spent her childhood as an itinerant “Third Culture Kid”, living in the Philippines, India, England, and France, before moving to the US. This intercultural mix and sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere has become the template for making layered and contemplative paintings with her own pictorial vocabulary and symbolism.

Tileston’s work has been featured in solo exhibits in Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Dallas, and group exhibits at the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston), The Elizabeth Foundation, Art in General and the Painting Center (New York), and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art. Her work is in the public collections of the Art Museum of South Texas, Dallas Museum of Art, Jameel Collection in Dubai, JP Morgan Chase, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the West Virginia University Art Museum.

She received a B.A. from Yale University (1983) and MFA from Indiana University (1988). She is the recipient of the Core Fellowship Residency at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1988-1990), the Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2004), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency (2005), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2011) and residency (2017), Yaddo Foundation residency (2019), Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France (2022), and Surf Point Foundation Residency in Maine (2023). She lives in Philadelphia, where she is a Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.

For the past twenty years, color, space, and architecture have been primary sources of inspiration for Tommy Fitzpatrick’s paintings. In 2013, he began creating sculptural assemblages in the studio that were stand-ins for the architecture. Most recently, Fitzpatrick is using computer-aided design (CAD) programs as the blueprint for the painted imagery. Because of this digitally dominant process, he is now leaving more evidence of the hand, by adding texture, and thickness of paint on the surface in addition to his hard-edge techniques. By combining digital and analog processes, Fitzpatrick is creating work that instigates a conversation between what it is and how it is made. This new approach to painting makes the meticulously painted geometric shapes appear as if it were hovering atop the canvas.

Born in Dallas in 1969, Tommy Fitzpatrick received a B.A. in Fine Art from the University of Texas in Austin in 1991, followed by an M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art in 1993. His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Dallas, Houston, New York, Madrid, London, Berlin and Seoul. His paintings are in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, and the Menil Collection in Houston. He is currently an Associate Professor of painting at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. He resides in New Braunfels, Texas.

IN THE VIEWING ROOM
Tommy Fitzpatrick

Through September 28

 Holly Johnson Gallery
1845 Levee Street @ Turtle Creek Blvd
214.369.0169,
Gallery hours are 10 to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and by appointment.
hollyjohnsongallery.com.