Tessellations

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Tessellations, an exhibition joining the work of thirteen artists who push the boundaries and perceptions of traditional patterning and repetition.

A mathematical principal that informs tile-like patterns, a tessellation is inherently regular, tight, and strict; composed of interlocking polygons, the resulting visual can seemingly repeat forever. The artists assembled in Tessellations look to this namesake patterning device—and to other pictorial alchemies like perspective and symmetry—as equal parts guiding principals and as logic boundaries to cross, muddle, and invert. While practicing across diverse media, each artist finds roots in abstraction with ties to broader histories of art, culture, spirituality, and the natural world.

Radiating geometries, made through both analog and digital means, are interpreted by Leola Pettway, Melissa Cody, and Jordan Ann Craig. The haphazard honeycomb of Pettway’s String Quilt(c. 1960s) and the irradiating diamonds and triangles of Cody’s weaving Sun Offering (2023) nod to, yet glitch the precision associated with the production of their respective textile traditions, while Craig’s No Moss Under My Feet(2023) embraces the grid with its respect to traditional geometric designs. Pettway veers away from strict formalism with her oblong plaid and floral hexagons that form a misshapen dance with blue squares—an implication of the fabric’s irregularity that produces a highly optical effect among the stitched together pieces.

Zach Harris’s Smoke and Mirror Self-Portrait (2022), Xylor Jane’s Replay (2023), and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’s Three Orange Figures Rising (2024) pick apart the perfection of tessellations by manipulating methods of repetition and duplication. Here the repetition of symbols, numbers, and figures verge into the hallucinatory and surreal, reverberating with latent meaning beyond what might appear explicit or objective.

In a similar vein, to double, to invert, or to split are mirror actions that cleave an image and imply an introduction of symmetry. For Kamrooz Aram, Sarah Crowner, Ryan Mrozowski, and Sascha Braunig, the mirror becomes a tool toward producing the first step of a possible pattern. Employing inversion, figurative silhouettes, and negative space, Aram, Crowner, Mrozowski, and Braunig form associations of sameness and hint toward a patterned repeat.

Grappling with the macro and microcosms of the world around us, David Benjamin Sherry, Louise Despont, and Kate Newby seek fractures and potentiality in naturally occurring patterns. Sherry’s chromogenic print Devils Garden, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah (2018) depicts the slow moving, seemingly improbable chance of beauty under the friction of time and weather, while at a much smaller scale, Newby’s sculptural arrangement suggests a fractal pond or grounded constellation comprising like, but not same, glass puddle-filled ceramic shells. A work from Despont’s Division Board series unites these contrasting scales, relishing in the continuity of change and the timeless emergence of difference from a singular whole, an imperfect tessellation.