Dance of Opposites

Meg Alexander
Josephine Burr
Isaac Jaegerman

April 9 – May 28, 2022

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 9 • 3pm – 5pm
Gallery hours: Thursdays, 12pm-4pm and by appointment

Drive-by Projects is pleased to present Dance of Opposites, an exhibition of drawings by Meg Alexander, clay sculpture by Jody Burr, and paintings by Isaac Jaegerman.

We were drawn to the ability of these three artists to embrace unexpected combinations of imagery and/or conceptual content, and to merge these seemingly disparate elements into a concordant whole. Jaegerman’s realistic landscapes pairs with geometric patterns, Alexander’s meticulously drawn birds abut fields of pure color, and Burr’s seemingly fragile porcelain forms give shape to volume and blur the boundaries of inside and out.

This work in particular is exploring a tender sort of intersection that relates to the everyday object as a point of contemplation. I’ve always been interested in the container as a metaphorical space – giving shape to emptiness, and creating a fluid boundary between what’s inside and outside. During the early days of the pandemic this idea really resurfaced in my work, as we all turned inward in a period of intense uncertainty, and our lives became limited to our homes. I thought about how the objects around us become anchors. I began creating “still life” vignettes of these empty, often bottomless volumes, built through a slow, tactile, open-ended process. The tension between fragility and solidity, familiarity and the unknown, and the way labor grounds us in the face of uncertainty, is what this work explores.
– Josephine Burr

These works pair imagined landscape scenes with complementary, quilt-like abstractions. My work balances two visual languages to impart a singular mood and expression of reality. In these diptychs, the solitary trees are totems for the settings behind them, anchoring the landscapes and dwelling, completely still, amidst rushing water, waning evening light or a warm summer afternoon. The accompanying cut-paper abstractions pull from the sense of motion or stillness and weave the feeling into an ethereal grid.
– Isaac Jaegerman

These drawings are from an ongoing series called ‘False Azure,’ a reference to the first lines from Nabokov’s poem in his novel ‘Pale Fire’:

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.”
In the poem, the writer, sitting inside and looking out, experiences the window as permeable whereas the bird is killed by the false blue of the window’s reflected sky. I find this duality compelling—an object can be itself or something else, experienced in multiple ways depending on your relationship to it. Each blue drawing (8 layers of color pencil on paper) is its own complex hue and exists simultaneously as color, shape, sky, and reflection of sky. Each grisaille bird drawing (diluted India ink on paper) is partnered with its blue, offering it an endless expanse of sky but also suggesting a false and potentially lethal reality.
– Meg Alexander