Xylor Jane
3Lakes, Sep 6 – Oct 19, 2019

CANADA is pleased to present 3Lakes an exhibition of new paintings by Xylor Jane and the artist's sixth exhibition with the gallery. In conjunction with the show, CANADA and parrasch heijnen gallery published ‘Xylor Jane: Notebooks,’ a compilation of drawings, notes, and preparatory sketches produced over the last twenty years.

Hued dots and blended triangles are counted, stacked, shifted and overlaid. Numerals written in binary code, a run of prime or palindromic numbers, calendars and numbers of days alive are mapped, mirrored and flipped. Through chroma and codes, Xylor Jane is marking time in a resolutely un-straightforward way.

The conflation of autobiographical time and deep (geological) time, happens in the singularity of each handmade dot. As in Days Alive -- where geometric triangles come forward and alternately recede over a painted gradient, shifting from pink to blue to green. If you allow your gaze to soften over this painting then narrow your eyes, quasi-digital numerals will appear which read: 30,103 - a palindromic prime - the same forward and backward. This is the number of days Jane will have lived on May 8th or 9th of 2046.

In 3Lakes 2Heavens, Jane presents a compositional union between an 8th order magic square written in binary and an I-Ching chart. Rendered in black triangle font, each hexagram of six figures represents the numerals 1-64. I-Ching combines eight elements in all possible configurations of two and its hexagrams can be stated as natural elements i.e. water, wind, fire. Of the eight trigrams in the dark center of the four middle hexagrams lives ‘three lakes and two heavens,’ giving the painting its title. Overall, the colors shift to form eight directions of crossing R.O.Y.G.B.I.V. rainbows.

An overt investment in systems drives the paintings to a place where they fall from comprehension, and return to a visual tapestry of the absurd and sublime. Xylor’s personal musings of her place in the universe of time and her limited stay on earth translate into veils of refined color stemming from a preoccupation with measurement, notation and magic. For the viewer, wobbly and atmospheric patterns are both disconcerting and reassuring to gaze upon. We sense that these patterns reflect and include us, but also something larger which is impossible to fully understand. The thrill of these paintings is the glimpse they offer us into this unknown.

Xylor Jane (b.1963, Long Beach, CA) lives and works in Greenfield, MA. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993. Jane has been exhibiting with CANADA since 2004 and has shown extensively in New York and elsewhere at galleries and institutions such as: parrasch heijnen gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA; the University Museum of Contemporary Art, Amherst, MA; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, IT; Almine Rech, Paris; Anton Kern Gallery, NY; among others. Her work has been featured in Art Forum, Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and the Brooklyn Rail. Xylor Jane: Notebooks was published in 2019 and features drawings from the last twenty years with essays by John Yau and Em Rooney.

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