ART AFTER GRAVITY - THE RECENT PAINTINGS OF LEAH SHANE DIXON
By Mat Gleason
Fly! Be free! Leah Shane Dixon is a painter rendering pictorial space without any sense of compositional gravity. This is the most ambitious direction in which abstraction can go. Jackson Pollock painted in the air to defy gravity. Mark Rothko rendered floating. Dixon composes spatial situations that ignore the viewer’s need for an up and a down. Our feet are on the floor when we enter the gallery to view these paintings but that is our problem; these pictures exist without our up and our down. They are statements of freedom as expressed chromatically. There is nothing tethered to ordinary experience, physically or visually, here. Where an artist goes when there is no harness is the story of how breakthroughs happen. With such possibilities in tow, along with their singular rugged beauty, the role of the audience is to fly along to wherever this work takes us.