At Dallas Art Fair 2020, JDJ presents an intergenerational conversation between four artists whose work occupies the space between abstraction and figuration.

Mark Barrow & Sarah Parke
Athena LaTocha
Zoe Avery Nelson
Susan Weil

Mark Barrow & Sarah Parke's collaborative art practice focuses on the process of weaving and its relationship to visual systems.

Barrow Parke are known for their intricate paintings on hand-woven linen.

The painted surfaces interact with the color, texture and pattern woven into the fabric.

Their work operates at the intersection of craft, technology and contemporary art.

Athena LaTocha's practice explores the relationship between natural and manmade landscapes.

LaTocha is inspired by her Native American heritage, her upbringing in Alaska, and Earthworks artists of the 1960s and 1970s.

The paintings are made from earth-toned inks, soil, and industrial solvents that she applies to the surface using tools such as tire shreds, scrap metal, and bricks.

The direct experience of wilderness, the untrampled landscape, and the unyielding power of nature is at the core of her practice.

She is also influenced by human intervention upon the earth—a reworking of the natural world, as can be found at quarries, gravel pits, and oil refineries.

Zoe Avery Nelson's paintings capture a sense of movement and fluidity.

Colors slide from one hue to another, and shapes shift from abstraction toward a sense of swirling figuration.

Much like their paintings, Nelson themself embodies a sense of fluidity.

The formal language embedded in the paintings visually traverses through their feeling of their non-binary gender identity.

Fascinated by sequential moments in time, Susan Weil sets images in motion in unconventional ways.

Weil came of age as an artist in the postwar period, studying under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College with Willem & Elaine de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg & Cy Twombly.

Weil's Configurations series, made in the late 1980s and early 1990s, features female figures loosely drawn in different poses across a grid of smaller sheets of paper.

The repetition of form implies a sense of movement and gesture within the composition.

Weil's Soft Fold paintings are made from simple shapes that are painted on both sides and draped into spatial configurations.

The works on paper from 1971 made with spray paint have a fantastic tension between abstraction and figuration.