Dorothy Robinson at Slate Gallery
Continental Drift On View in Brooklyn
By: Adam Zucker - Jun 29, 2009
Slate Gallery
Open by appointment through the summer
136 Wythe Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211
718-387-3921
Dorothy Robinson's landscapes are a powerful metaphor for the human condition. They are grandiose and beautiful as well as haunting and destructive. Her environments twist, turn and split apart, merging sky into water or disappearing off the edge of a cliff or underneath the earth itself.
Unlike traditional landscape painting, Dorothy Robinson's works are not a depiction of a moment in time or a particular location. They are indicative of the artist's process of forms, elements and events that move and change. Certain arrangements in Robinson's paintings are reminiscent of landscapes she has encountered through travel across the United States. Intuitive paint on canvas conjures up a wide range of emotions and personal reflections that express the artist's own abrupt endings and painful beginnings. For Robinson, landscape painting is more about unpredictable events than the arrangement of forms into a single point perspective.
Her current solo exhibition, Continental Drift, is at Brooklyn's Slate Gallery. This is her second show at the gallery following Tectonics in 2008. The work and the title of her current show refer to unseen forces beyond our control that still shape our lives.
Robinson's interests stem from geomorphology and physics, which earned her a Bachelor Degree in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. The artist spent time in many different locations throughout the nation.
The largest painting in the show, Upper Crust (2009) is inspired by her residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in Amherst, VA. In an age where most of us have a distant connection to our planet, Robinson's paintings reminds us of our physical and emotional connection to the Earth. Many of us are not attuned to our delicate connection with our surroundings until something drastic happens, such as a natural disaster. We generally don't see the constant changes even though elements are eroding and the landscape is changing every second of everyday.
The metaphors in Robinson's art, however, run much deeper than geography and physics. The shifting plates of the Earth also represent a deep emotional level in the paintings. For an artist who is always in motion and destabilized from one place or another, the landscapes become personal works of expressionism.
Continental Drift will be on display through the summer at the Slate Gallery. While the gallery is closed during the summer months it opens by appointment to see Robinson's paintings. It is well worth the effort to see this work.