Rachel Foullon Julia Goldman Van Hanos Yadir Quintana Ryan Sullivan

Museum 52 is pleased to present, what the midnight can show us. The title, borrowed from a 1901 seasonal field guide titled Sharp Eyes, considers the artists’ common interest in the connection between observation, representation and abstraction.

After hand-dyeing a precisely cut piece of raw canvas, Rachel Foullon adds sea salt to stiffen the material, which, when rolled and hung, takes on the appearance of a memorialized bandana, scarf or yoke. Stained cedar structures inspired by Hallenhaus architecture frame the hanging sculptures and point to the artist’s interest in our present-day detachment to an agrarian lifestyle. Foullon has recently exhibited at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Andrea Rosen Gallery, Wallspace and Andrew Kreps Gallery.

Julia Goldman avoids illustrative composition, allowing forms to be suggested rather than precisely depicted. Working with her immediate surroundings, Goldman reconstitutes the immediate into an exchange of formal decisions based on vocabularies of form, line and colour. Goldman graduated from Columbia’s MFA program in 2008.

Van Hanos is driven by a desire to allow drawing to be led by the automatic and instinctive. Drawing has been a constant for Hanos, and is deeply rooted in his painting practice. For the past seven years he has made a drawing a day, titling each according to the day of their creation. One line leads to another in a continuum, incorporating hidden symbols, words and images. Hanos has recently exhibited at GBE Passerby and the Baltimore Contemporary Museum.

Yadir Quintana’s practice embraces the actual, the geometric and the abstract. Quintana juxtaposes the literal with the unreal to create beguiling moments of tension that draw you into the textural surface of his geometric sculptures. Quintana was born in Mexico in 1975 and received his MFA from Yale University.

Ryan Sullivan’s paintings are more accreted than composed. His dense abstractions emerge from the accumulation of sediments (paints, lacquers, resins and waxes) deposited over long periods of time and gradually worked-over through repeated processes. Despite the layering the paintings possess an atmosphere of decay, as if the deterioration of the surface happens as fast as the fabrication. Sullivan graduated from RISD in 2005.