"In the main gallery, a series of large-scale works are made from t-shirt fabric, marked and soaked with washes of color and imprinted with the patterns of nets. The nets—undulating across the works in an illusion of three dimensionality—are fragmented by a process in which the painted t-shirt fabric is cut into hundreds of pieces, and then sewn together in geometric shapes. The use of the net alludes to the migration of people and who does or does not get “caught up” as nations debate the politics of belonging and identification..."
"The title The Invert recalls Freud’s term for a homosexual, a now archaic reference that persisted into the 1960’s. Referring to homosexuals as 'inverts' signaled that their desire was bent or literally turned over, and contributed to the idea that their bodies could be righted, or fixed, if only they were 'straightened out.' In VanDyke’s work, displacement and inversion is a given: the work and the body are oriented so as to discover new possibilities for process and encounter..."
Installation of paintings, dripping sculptures, and photographs
part of New Art Dealers Association fair
Self Evidence
Performance lecture
University of the Arts, Philadelphia
April 2017
&
I Martedi Credici, Rome
(in association with Temple University Rome), October 2015
The Skowhegan School Project Space, NYC, April 2015
Presenting at 17, NYC
(project of artist Elise Gardella)
2014
"Jonathan VanDyke looks for himself in a family photograph taken during his childhood. The picture shows his adopted Uncle wearing his mother's dress while holding the trunk of a stuffed elephant in his mouth. VanDyke's performance explores the issues faced by queers who were children during the AIDS crisis and 80's culture wars, and how the hyper-capitalism and theatricality of this period nurtured a certain type of passing (including his own).
Augmented by research into a gay panic that happened in his rural hometown, passages from he soap operas he watched as a child, and memories of a disappeared Uncle, he evokes the repressed ghosts of a lost generation of queer mentors while exploring his own transition from theatrical youth to closeted jock..."
The Amish of central Pennsylvania created quilts using pieces of fabric cut into shapes. Triangles and squares and rectangles populate these textiles, stitch by stitch, their colors sometimes mismatched in ways that might embarrass Albers, who carefully recorded his color choices on the backs of his paintings. I grew up near this Amish community, though I am not Amish myself, and when I study these patterns I often wonder how Amish women achieved a spectacular 19th century minimalism in a culture of such strict Protestantism that they refuse electricity. What about the charge and energy of the bodies that lay under these quilts, that slept and huddled for warmth and fornicated beneath them? Did all those shapes take root in the subconscious of those sleepers? Did they wake up with dreams of triangles and rectangles sprouting arms and legs?