A Statement from the Curator, Kyle Butler:

 

In her paintings, Dorothy Fitzgerald works with both unwieldy processes and topics.  Her process is, in part, a managed incidental development of surface with scuffs, smears and line breaks left alone to perform. Thematically, Fitzgerald co-ops otherwise antagonistic narratives. She disarms harmful, normative notions around gender by reflecting on how that language and those images filter through her.  She asserts the calm of nature as corrective to the pressures to be hyper-focused on work.  The themes have their own turbulence that the painting process connects with, where texture and gesture are given space to play out just as conflict is given time for reflection.

 

Matthew Sharp draws from a reoccurring set of images that suggest an optimism and joyfulness to making.  Though he’s not always concerned with identifying what the image being made is, when he does, it is often things regarded warmly like small animals and church steeples.  The paintings are steady in their making as well, with Sharp slowly adding layers of paint over layers of drawing in an attempt to resolve the image in mind.  Like Fitzgerald’s paintings, there is a struggle to define that is evident in the agitated finish.  But in Sharp’s paintings, that struggle is recorded maximally, with every bit of surface scrubbed and scrawled over.  As testament to the openness of his process, Sharp often arrives at a point of finish as if by notion: “I think this is done."

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**For any inquiries about Dorothy Fitzgerald's work please contact her directly via her website.