Viewing Room, Selected by Florencia Escudero and Nadia Haji Omar
Michael Dotson, Florencia Escudero, Nadia Haji Omar, Anjuli Rathod
Dec 1, 2020 - Jan 23, 2021

Gallery artists Florencia Escudero and Nadia Haji Omar create complex sculptures and paintings. They reference structures and objects that are somewhat familiar to us and then show us new ways of relating color, meaning, and form. Escudero constructs a futuristic idea of women through sculptures that formulate visionary relationships between parts of the body, fashion accessories, signs of labor, and craft. In her paintings, Nadia Haji Omar creates a fluid and open idea of language through flat, abstract markings that bear a resemblance to writing. She maps these marks within dense, energetic patterns arranged into grids. Language evolves as do bodies, as does the way that painting and sculpture extend beyond the boundaries of their own material aspect.

Escudero and Haji Omar each invited an artist from outside the gallery to participate in this project. Painters Michael Dotson and Anjuli Rathod create expansive visual spaces structured by scenes that include the human form. Rathod’s paintings on canvas unfold within the outline of the human torso while Dotson’s intensely constructed dimensional surface builds within the outlines of a vignette. Rathod’s paintings explore the idea of the personal journey and depict magical spaces somewhere between the here and now and a separate realm. The watery, ethereal sense of her marks conjures a nocturnal, spiritual feeling. Dotson’s painting includes a central figure with flowing locks of hair, who interacts and merges with two cherub-like interlocutors. Figures blend into each other, losing their independence from one another, in contrast to the quality of distinctness that characterizes the discrete planes of flat purple, pink, and green color that Dotson layers to visualize an extending, expanding three-dimensional scene.