Rowena Dring

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Rowena Dring in the gallery at 545 West 20th Street. A reception for the artist will be held on Wednesday, February 16, from six to eight pm.

Rowena Dring’s landcapes comprise hundreds of pieces of fabric, cut out by hand, painstakingly stitched together, and stretched over canvas. At a distance they read as large and dynamic paintings. At close range, however, the images break down into their components; fabric and thread appear as entirely abstract areas of flat color and animated line, and the artist’s complex and elaborate appliqué technique becomes manifest.

Dring bases these works on photographs she takes herself. A recent vacation in Costa Rica, for example, yielded the source for the idyllic Tamarindo Beach as well as the intense tapestry of foliage in Emerald Forest. More than pages from a modern tourist’s diary, these images represent a platform for the artist’s personal and extended meditation on travel, memory, and the natural world. Her materials, methods, and style emphasize the constructs of representation; pictorial elements such as depth, atmospheric perspective, and intricate reflections in water are laid bare by their translation into irregular patches of interlocking and carefully chosen hues, yet are no less effective and wondrous because of it.

Dring’s images bring to mind a diverse lineage of Pop Art, stained glass, Impressionist landscapes, and Japanese Ukiyo-e prints. She assimilates these to craft traditions drawn from women’s sewing circles and hobbyists’ paint-by-numbers. With a unique blend of high and low, Dring stitches together a new vision of landscape.

Born in England, Rowena Dring lives and works in Amsterdam. This is her second exhibition at Elizabeth Dee Gallery. Concurrently, her work will be featured in Landscape Confection at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, which will travel to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California. An exhibition of her work was held at the Ausstellungshalle zeitgenössische Kunst Münster in Germany in 2004.