On View: June 3 - 28, 2022

Exhibition Reception: Thursday, June 23rd

Durational Art Performance: Saturday, June 18th + Saturday, June 25th

Chelsea Music Festival is delighted to present a solo exhibition of recent works by 2022 Visual Artist-in-Residence Jonathan VanDyke.

The artist's sewn paintings, composed through intentionally slow processes of accumulation, and often taking over a year to construct, are made from fabrics gathered from friends and companions. He stains and marks these fabrics through virtuosic painting techniques developed in his Brooklyn studio over the last decade, including gestural painting strategies that he devised in long-term collaboration with dancers and performers from the NYC queer art community of which he is a part.

The artist's installation, created specifically for the Festival, incorporates components that will change and evolve over the month of June, including a selection of the amaryllis flowers that he raises in his studio, a sculpture that drips paint, and unique photocopies of details and scraps from his studio process. VanDyke's works are layered with allusions to art and design history and to domestic craft, and he mounts his paintings on fabricated display structures – in this case, metal shelving components.

Inspired by the unbounded media fluidity of early twentieth century artists like Sonia Delauney and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, VanDyke has long explored the relation between abstract painting and the performing arts, including dance and musical compositions. In his words, both sonic orchestral works and visual abstractions are "explorations of states of mind and experiences of bodies for which one cannot find language." VanDyke conceives of his paintings as devices for long looking and his installations as spaces for slowing down. In making works that are rich with metaphor and subtext, he insists that, "abstraction is not forgetting – abstraction is not a way of removing oneself from the world – but a way of going deeper in."

Chelsea Music Festival celebrates great music by convening world-leading musicians & artists in the performing, culinary, and visual arts for an international audience. The Festival invites artists, composers, and performers to collaborate in pursuit of new perspectives in artistic expression.

Jonathan VanDyke was born and raised in the Pennsylvania countryside and has lived and worked in New York City since 2001. He studied at The Glasgow School of Art and The University of Glasgow as a Rotary Ambassadorial Fellow, The Skowhegan School, The Atlantic Center for the Arts (where he was mentored by artist Paul Pfeiffer), and The Milton Avery Graduate School of Bard College, where he received his MFA. He has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions internationally, including at 1/9unosunove Rome, Loock Galerie Berlin, Scaramouche New York, Four Boxes Gallery Denmark, and The Columbus Museum. Solo performances and commissions have appeared at The Power Plant in Toronto, Storm King Art Center, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The National Academy Museum, and Socrates Sculpture Park.. His work was recently included in the landmark exhibition Queer Abstraction, organized by The Des Moines Art Center. He has been a resident at Yaddo, Qwatz in Rome, The Hans Scharoun House in Germany, and The Krabbesholm Højskole in Denmark. VanDyke leads sustained observation and embodied practice workshops internationally. He was recently appointed an Artist in Residence in Studio Arts at Bard College, where he will begin teaching in the fall. He is represented by 1/9unosunove Rome and Loock Galerie Berlin.