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The City Light: Works By Jessica Dunne
Comes to the McAllen International Museum
A brilliant exhibition has arrived at the McAllen International
Museum. Entitled "The City Light: Works by Jessica Dunne," this collection
of paintings and prints documents the artist's fascination with the
nocturnal world as illuminated by vapor street lights. Jessica Dunne
explains the source of her inspiration and the artistic goals she has set
for herself in this marvelous series of paintings and prints:
"A few years ago, while driving down the highway at night in my hometown, I
was overwhelmed with nostalgia for my childhood. I then realized there was
a brownout and with all the street lights extinguished the dark road was
as I had experienced it as a child, before we replaced stars with
sodium-vapor bulbs. Over the years, on visits to my childhood home, I had
been incensed by the new three-story beach "mansions" and tee-shirt
dealerships, yet had taken little notice of the street lighting that had
altered the nature of night itself. The dark highway was a visual prompt
into a memory of my past, something that rarely happens, especially in
contrast to the constant reminders of other times through taste, sound and
smell.
This is how I came upon my current project, an exploration of night as seen
through a car's windshield. In a few years, the highway power cartel will
replace the greenish mercury-vapor and pink sodium-vapor street lights that
dominate my work with sun-like halide bulbs, once again altering our
nocturnal world (and my palette). My goal is to get my present experience
down on canvas before it disappears.
People sometimes think my work is critical of modem life because my
landscapes comprise buildings and cars, not the more traditional trees and
fields. In fact, I paint what I paint because I believe my subjects are
beautiful. People have also told me they have more fin driving at night
after seeing my work. Me too. Observing taillights reflect off wet pavement
or comparing the distance at which different colored auras bleed into the
mist makes hydroplaning in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge bearable.
I call myself a painter, but I make monotypes and aquatints too. For the
monotypes, I develop an image by dabbing etching ink onto a mylar plate
with my fingertips, subtracting the lights with cotton swabs. I then print
to create an image. The monotypes are really printed paintings: I make a
single copy. The technique enables me to achieve a depth and subtlety of
color that I have not found possible in any other medium.
The black and white 'spit-bite' aquatints are yet another process.
'Spit-bite' means biting the image with a combination of acid and saliva
directly into a rosin-coated copper plate. The copper becomes the matrix
for several identical prints an edition. I find the fluid and painterly
results worth the unsavory process.
Monotype and spit-bite aquatint combine the freedom of painting with the
mysterious quality of printmaking, where ink is pressed into the paper as
opposed to resting on the surface. In both techniques the final image is
reversed from how I painted, and contains unexpected marks and nuances.
That unpredictability is what draws me to printmaking and, inevitably,
sends me fleeing back to the relative comfort of painting."
"The City Light: Works by Jessica Dunne" will be at the McAllen
International Museum from 4 December 1999 to 27 February 2000.
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