Xylor Jane
NDE, Feb 26 – Mar 26, 2009

CANADA is pleased to mount a third solo show by Massachusetts based painter Xylor Jane. Mathematics and the grid are once again at use by Ms. Jane to mark the intervals of life and the passage of time in bold color and complicated rhythms. Jane's paintings operate as meta calendars clocking the passage of days, weeks and years. For this latest show the paintings plot the time period of our lives, marking the days and months that built the recent past (1960's - 80's) and span several decades into the future. Each day is marked with a point of specific color. These colors are counted, hues are shifted and new systemic patterns are built and overlaid onto each painting. Illustrations of irrational number sequences (Pi or Phi), a run of prime or triangular numbers, and palindromic numeric sequences are drawn, overlaid, mirrored and flipped. The conflation of autobiographical time and deep (geological) time, through the overlay of infinite number successions translate for Ms. Jane into the near death experience of each painting.

An overt investment in pattern drives the paintings to a place where they fall from comprehension, and return to a visual tapestry of the absurd and sublime. Any notion that the idea creates the art is put to rest by the sheer madness of the machine. Unlike process artists like Sol Lewitt, the recipes at play in Ms Jane's work are for one cook only. The paintings remind one of the infinite project of Roman Opalka and the date works of On Kawara. The gridded paintings of Agnes Martin's softly patterned and colorfully hazy abstract vistas are also an apt comparison. The viewer is left with residue of Jane's idiosyncratic and unselfconscious investigations. The personal musings of the artist on her place in the universe of time and her limited stay on earth translate into veils of refined color stemming from a slightly manic preoccupation with measurement, symbolism and notation. For the viewer, wobbly and atmospheric patterns are both disconcerting and reassuring to gaze upon, because we are also part of Xylor Jane's vast vision of the world.

[...]