Lee Dawson: Phantom Hand

March 7 – April 20

Opening Friday, March 7 with a reception from 6-8pm

Lee Dawson extemporaneous technique begins with intuitive mark making, a process that challenges conventional notions of spectatorship. Using simple gestures as a departure point, illusionistic figures emerge to form moments of recognizability within seemingly chaotic settings. Through various forms of contortion and amalgamation, the images in Dawson’s compositions often confer mythic, ghostly, or other-worldly incantations. Just as Dawson’s figures take shape, the process becomes more considered, amounting to precise color combinations, a maximal compositional strategy, and a complex dialogue between representational and abstract elements that recall contemporaries like Sue Williams, Daniel Richter, or Cecily Brown. 

While Dawson’s imagery might initially resemble fantastical storytelling, the crux of her practice relies on an effort to recreate real moments from lived experience. Disregarding traditional notions of representation, Dawson focuses instead on the manner in which objects from the exterior world appear through our mind’s eye, a spectral presence that emphasizes the multiplicity of visual experience. Rather than trying to capture individual moments, Dawson’s paintings depict motion through time, a process that discourages the division between internal and external consciousness and emphasizes fluidity guided by intuition, an èlan vital that decenters the artist as the primary source of inspiration. The resultant nebulous forms appear paradoxically distant but also familiar, engaging our collective consciousness and inviting interpretation about what they might resemble or from where they could have originated. 

Ultimately Dawson’s compositions exist as unresolved images, transient depictions of ungraspable emotions and atomized visions of the physical world. Often appearing as if memory, time, and place occur simultaneously, the art-historical categories of figuration, landscape, and abstraction seem irrelevant in the context of Dawson’s mystifying entities. While Dawson’s project of dissection, conglomeration, and reduction might appear alien, the technique emphasizes interconnectedness over difference, a mysticism beyond scientific explanation that challenges the distinction between what is considered real and what is imaginary. 

Lee Dawson (b. 1993 New York, NY) Graduated from École des Beaux-Arts (2015) and The School of Visual Arts (2017). They’ve undertaken residencies at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Casa De Las Flores and Na Bolom. Recent exhibitions include Entanglement and A Study in Form at James Fuentes Gallery, New York, Silver Horseshoe at Hyacinth Gallery, New York, JUXTAPOZ Group show, New York, Unser Haus at ZK/U, Berlin, Germany, Early Man 2 at the Hole in New York, and High Stakes Exhibition during Paris Art Week 2023. This is Lee Dawson’s second solo exhibition with Hyacinth.