HQ is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan VanDyke entitled Gloved Impediment. VanDyke has created a site-specific installation of new work, augmented by a performance on the evening of the opening.

VanDyke’s installation is a realization of the artist’s ongoing impulse to make work that slowly unfolds and changes as it performs for the viewer. In his installations and photographs, color field and abstract expressionist painting serve as a backdrop that is ruptured by his investigations. His interest in the modernist legacy is not a purely formal one, but an expansive interest in “the space around this work – the way it was integrated into homes and museums, the way it was received by both the critical establishment and the broader public, the psychology lingering under and behind the work’s surface, the bodies that made it.” His drawing for the show’s invitation references those very bodies, at work in the space of painting’s production. It is an altered photograph of painter Kenneth Noland, seen standing on a ladder above two kneeling male assistants. VanDyke adds holes in the space of Noland’s hands; out of these punctures an oozing drip of color runs down the artist’s leg and onto the backs of his assistants.

The central form of Gloved Impediment is an 8’ tall by 25’ long canvas, hung just in front of the gallery’s main wall, loosely, as if it is a curtain. Behind the canvas, a system of tubes irrigates its surface with highly diluted liquid paint. Some of these tubes pierce the surface of the curtain and drip upon it; others drip just behind the curtain so that the paint bleeds through its surface. The piece takes on new colors each day that the show is open to the public, so that each week the canvas will reveal new stains and washes of color. VanDyke has carpeted the floor of the gallery, so that the carpet soaks up the excess paint. Over time the carpet will collect color and grime, exhibiting the dirty beauty that is evident in much of VanDyke’s work. For the May 8 opening, VanDyke choreographs two male performers to sit in front of the curtain, wearing white dress shirts while paint drips down their backs. As visitors observe the installation, they too become actors, the canvas curtain framing the performance of their gaze.

VanDyke received his MFA in sculpture from Bard College in 2004, and in 2008 he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2007 he was a resident at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where he worked with artist Paul Pfeiffer. In 2005 VanDyke was as an Emerging Artist Fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY. In 2007 he had solo shows at Pocket Utopia in Brooklyn and at The Hartnett Gallery of the University of Rochester. He has built large-scale installations at The Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, and at the Islip Art Museum in New York, and his works have been included in group exhibitions at The Sheppard Gallery of the University of Nevada, PS122 Gallery in Manhattan, Fruit & Flower Deli in New York, and at University of Wolverhampton in England. In April 2009 VanDyke’s work was featured in the “Introducing” section of Modern Painters magazine. VanDyke recently received an Artists and Communities grant from the Mid-Atlantic Art Foundation.