Night Gallery is thrilled to present The Progress of Love, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Jesse Mockrin. This will be her second solo exhibition with the gallery.
At a certain moment painting turned its eyes, without a trace of shame or pious moralizing, to the newly born world of fashion. It basked in its own vanity, knowing for the first time its fickle caprice, its dazzling filigree of ever-change, not as the mark of a fallen world, but as the very sign of lasting life. It's no surprise that life itself was in fashion.
Butterflies, and seashells, and microscopes, and gardens overgrown and thick with uncertain desire. The whole world was breaking up into perfect shimmering fragments, and the only thing left holding them in place was the luminescent gravity of fascination. It would not be long before the deadening calm of certainty's return. Sharp revenge of the cosmological accountants, who would put everything in its rightful place. But for a brief moment, all the signs of the world were sliding across its surfaces. Fleeting traction, then drift, and spin. Sometimes the stutter of kaleidoscopic pastiche, others the slow, torsional rhythms of an oceanic fluidity, and everywhere the lush perfume of pleasure's promise. Perhaps painting above all others made itself into the image of that moment, tracing the contours of a world as it flickered across the patterned damask of a fantastical dreamscape, plunged into billowing satin, and peeked furtively out and in at itself, haunted only by the strange deadpan of the future looking back.
Text by Edward Sterrett
Jesse Mockrin (b. Silver Spring, MD, 1981) received her MFA from UCSD in 2011 and her BA from Barnard College in 2003. In 2014, Mockrin had a solo exhibition at Night Gallery, and was included in a group exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters in New York. She was included in the 2013 exhibition Made in Space at Night Gallery, which also traveled to Venus Over Manhattan and Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York. Her work has been written about in Modern Painters and Art Agenda. She lives and works in Los Angeles.