Tokyo Gallery + BTAP
Jan. 16 — Feb. 9
Japan is the land of regeneration. The ongoing cycle of earthquakes, volcanoes, typhoons and tsunami, together with the devastation of conventional and atomic warfare during World War II, has left Japan more profoundly conscious of the fragility and transience of the physical world than perhaps any other country.
For her second solo exhibition at Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, titled "Regeneration," Jane Dixon is showing her newest works on paper — drawings and prints that explore the dichotomy of absence and presence, the traces left behind that remind us of our vulnerabilities as individuals and as a social system. The "Ground Plan" and "Floor Plan" drawings are made from layers of rubbings, at first taken directly from the surface of existing buildings and then later from relief paintings the artist made from original photographs. The paintings are discarded, but their traces remain embedded in the paper, layered over the marks from the buildings. These final drawings, which feel like ancient blueprints for an unfamiliar location, are a visual and temporal abstraction of memory and physicality.
"The Braille Suite" of embossed etchings — shown with a corresponding series of rubbed drawings made especially for this exhibition — are also based on raw information about the urban environment and filtered through layers of conceptual abstraction. The Braille is a transcription of texts taken from Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities"; however, in Dixon's words, the process "translates" them into something untouchable, unreadable and enigmatic.