Jane Westrick
Jane Westrick is an artist living and working in Jersey City, NJ. Her paintings have been featured in New American Paintings, and exhibited in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere in the US.
Operating in the space between painting and drawing, her works on paper interweave washes of diluted oil paint with linear imagery. Wandering lines create links between remembered or imagined moments. Westrick received an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, and the International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Umbria, Italy. Since 2014, she has taught undergraduate courses at Mason Gross School of the Arts, including Painting, Drawing and Visual Thinking.
Westrick’s paintings on Arches oil paper occupy a world of in-betweens— they are concerned with color perception and phenomena, while at the same time their symbol-like yet cryptic imagery hints at a narrative lying just beyond reach. Loosely recognizable as figures, the moments of representation do not appear to exist within linear time, but are spread out across the field of the paper in an all-over composition. In some works, figures are obscured by layers of colorful marks which accumulate like interference or noise. The events depicted are slippery, like forms seen behind closed eyelids, memories which change over time, or encounters heard but not seen, their details imagined rather than known.
Two of the paintings take inspiration from Westrick’s memory of sitting for an extended time, once for a portrait, another for a haircut, while their thoughts and recollections wandered.
From the artist:
“My paintings visualize the activity of thinking, showing the nature of a mind distracted and populated by images. When I paint, I attempt to remain in the present moment, placing utmost attention at the tip of the brush, grounding myself in the feeling of a line dragged across a textured plane. I am interested in the nature of perception and sensation, in producing an experience of interaction with color in the present moment, yet the experience I relate is also psychological — imbued with illogical thoughts and scenes which bubble up like bad memories, recurrent dreams, or challenging ruminations.”
These drawings are part of Westrick’s ongoing exploration of the performance of gender in ballroom dance, and by extension, larger society. Westrick depicts couples who defy expected roles and disregard the aesthetics of the sport — one that has always focused and relied on gender binaries.
When Westrick took ballroom dance classes, they found there was no role they could easily fit into — Westrick seemed to themself to always be obscuring a part of their own identity, whether it was the subsuming of the masculine qualities into female or the assumption of heterosexual orientation. To make these pencil drawings, Westrick used as source material images of dancers in stereotypical roles which they then reimagine with different genders, costumes, and attitudes. They show moments of feminine strength and leadership, masculine grace and flexibility. Westrick imagines these dancers engaging in “liquid leading” where the roles of leader and follower switch midway through a piece. More than a neat flipping of genders, this dance series imagines what it would be like to embody various identities, to take on gendered roles from a range of orientations. By disrupting traditional roles, Westrick envisions alternative modes of expression for dancers of all genders.
