Soft Fact
Dana Lok
March 24-April 22, 2017
Clima
VIA ALESSANDRO STRADELLA 5
MILAN 20129
In this exhibition, a forest landscape becomes the stage for a play of flatness and depth, surface and content, point of view and vista. In a continued exploration of painting as a theater set, Lok’s new work probes the relationship between illusion and fact in pictorial space. Some works in this show offer a tilted perspective of a painted landscape to reveal the particularity of the stance a viewer must maintain in order to preserve a painting’s pictorial depth. Such a perspective is not unlike the perfect view of a play from front and center theater seats.
Taken together, the paintings and drawings in this show entertain the idea that pictures can have properties usually
attributed to statements: they can be true or false, they can mislead, and they can make promises. Here, an image of a light-filled grove becomes an assertion or argument that presents only selective evidence to support its claims of
distance, depth and light.
In Soft Fact, images and assertions have weight, volume and texture—they are things to encounter with both visual and haptic senses. Fingerprints stand as evidence of tactile investigation or entitled possession. The objects touched are plush, luminous, duplicitous, impossible.
Dana Lok (b. in Pennsylvania, USA) lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2015 and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh in 2011.
Recent exhibitions: The Set of All Sets, solo exhibition, CHEWDAY’S, London; A night out of town, Clima, Milan; In Place Of, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; The Crack Up, Room East Gallery, New York; Floating Point, Judith Charles Gallery, New York and The
Columbia MFA Thesis Exhibition, Fisher Landau Center for Art, New York.
Lok was included in New American Paintings, Northeast Issue #128, curated by Laura Phipps.