Just Looking-Hearne Pardee

“Pillars”, Acrylic Collage, 38” x 50”, 2022

Exhibition Dates: September 5 – September 30, 2023

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 7, 2023, 5:00-8:00 p.m.

Dance performance: Saturday, September 23 at 4pm

Combining painting, photography and dance in an installation that emphasizes the immediacy of visual experience, Hearne Pardee extends his involvement with everyday spaces in an exhibition of new work at the Bowery Gallery.

Pardee’s collages expose the layered complexity of bodily movement through time: “stitches” of color, drawn from a Josef Albers color exercise, link together snapshots taken on daily runs through a neighborhood park, while larger collages heighten perceptual awareness of juxtaposed edges within shifting “windows” of overlapping frames. Installed across from one another in the gallery, works on the walls utilize these gridded structures to activate the intervening spaces, while patterned drawings displayed on the floor recall us to the pull of gravity. Together they establish a context for choreographed movement, to be enacted on September 23 in a collaborative performance by Dance Theater Works David Grenke.

Pardee anchors these shifts of focus in a larger temporal register with paintings from observation alluding to stones and water, classic emblems of stability and flux in Asian landscape painting. With stones beside clear vases of water, set against abstracted depictions of a “solstice circle” in his neighborhood park, they link local and cosmic spaces; the transparent vessel expands visibility, and becomes an eye that returns our gaze.

Further works can be found at www.hearnepardee.com and on Instagram @hearnepardee.