carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce Dreamwork of Trees, the gallery’s seventh solo exhibition with the Australian artist Jessica Rankin.

Jessica Rankin approaches painting as a speculative act of world building. Her exuberant, abstract compositions draw upon her own memories, imagination, and visual references, but also explicitly incorporate embroidered citations from queer and women poets. Rankin’s paintings are spaces of encounter: between lines of text, thread, and paint, but also between her own practice and the poetry of the writers she admires such as Kamilah Aisha Moon, Carl Phillips, Lisel Mueller, Etel Adnan, and Sappho. 

While her earlier paintings were more closely linked to processes of chance and improvisation, which the artist described as a kind of “free fall,” Rankin’s most recent work has a more intentional, grounded approach that is explicitly in conversation with the history of painting. Just as individual words gleaned through close, embodied reading enter into her paintings, so too do brushstrokes, pigments, or shapes inspired by her study of works by other artists. This dialogical approach to making evinces a radical sense of openness, not merely to the influences of other thinkers and makers, but also to the synergetic possibilities of bringing together different forms of visual media. Rankin’s combination of vivid stains of color with energetic brushwork, impasto, and embroidery floss upend traditional hierarchies of visual art and handicraft in favor of a much more fluid, dynamic approach that, in the artist’s words, “tries to think about mark-making inhabiting the realm of language and the realm of language inhabiting the mark making—and the ways in which they speak to each other and become each other.”