Can I Sit Next to You?

How do we form new and meaningful connections through exclusively virtual means during a global pandemic? How do we collaborate and genuinely create with one another across the new virtual landscape? What is the creative nature of distance? A small group of artists have converged in Miami at Dimensions Variable to consider these questions and, through their respective and collaborative work, co-exist and see each other in their own work. Can I Sit Next to You? features works by artists Nicole Doran, Jacin Giordano, Coe Lapossy, Loretta Park, and Brandon Opalka.

Following several months of strictly virtual communications, the artists’ final collaborative action is the installation of their individual and collective work at Dimensions Variable, where select works are paired together. In so doing, each artist has a work that ‘sits’ next to every other artist in the show—a gesture that is both collaborative and generative and asks where one artist’s work ends and the next begins. These pairings intentionally remove the physical distance—and emphasize the closeness—that has existed between these artists for the last several months.

The work of Chicago-based artist Nicole Doran exists in a liminal space between painting, assemblage, and material abstraction and her paintings are often adorned with handmade ceramic objects strung like pendants or charms across their respective surfaces which offer a kind of charge to the work. Jacin Giordano is similarly interested in the tactility of paint and the significance of deconstruction and his works often feature networks of holes carefully carved out of the painting surface, revealing their insides to the viewer. Their exposure reveals something about the nature of both paint and the depth of the artistic process. The body and disrupting the binary in which it exists are central to the work of Coe Lapossy, whose video series of speaking paintings and hand-painted found pillows each recall our relationship to the human body and chart new futurities in which to connect with other bodies, painterly or otherwise. The sculptural work of Loretta Park is rooted in an exploration of value, the meaning of materials, and modalities of abstraction. Through the use of brightly colored found and discarded articles as source material, Park’s work is a rejection of the material and historical hierarchy of sculpture. Works by Miami native Brandon Opalka function as ruminations on emotional states, isolation, and the complexity and beauty of the natural world. The surfaces of his paintings collapse in carefully cut fragments of canvas, like snake skin or frayed palm leaves—a necessary shedding that makes new movement possible.

The deeply collaborative nature and collective curation of “Can I Sit Next to You?” is a profound statement about the current state of creative collaboration and encourages each of us to sit a little closer together.

– Evan Garza