DARK MATTER - SELECTED WORK

October 21 - November 28, 2018

Jemison Faust & Jason Chase

-noun ASTRONOMY

1. (in some cosmological theories) nonluminous matter that is postulated to exist
in space and that could take any of several forms including weakly interacting particles

(cold dark matter) or high-energy randomly moving particles created soon after the Big Bang (hot dark matter)

ATELIER NEWPORT's fall show entitled, Dark Matter, is a two-person exhibition featuring Jemison Faust and Jason Chase. Dark Matter, will open October 21st and run through November 28th. An opening reception will be held on Sunday, October 21st from 2:00pm-4:00pm.

Dark Matter, will explore the gravitational effects information has on our psyche. Scientists believe that dark matter is invisible to light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation, making it impossible to detect with current instruments, and known to exist because of the gravitational effects it appears to have on galaxies and galaxy clusters. For Jemison Faust, this body of paintings explore her fascination with the enormous sea of information just beneath the surface of our daily lives: the algorithms that inform what and how we see, the tracking of our movements and the gathering of millions of bits of information. It is always there but much of it goes unnoticed. Faust searched for one image that captures the emotion of the topic. In this case, it was a brain scan photo showing thousands of connections, overlapping functions, bursts of activity...."all rather wonderful to behold", said Faust. In this work, she has copied this abstract and layered the image onto the paintings surface and then worked back into it with acrylic paint and other mediums.

Jason Chase is the first artist to paint in Singularity Black, a new technology creating a solid black paint invented by a team of scientists in Massachusetts and now used by NASA. Chase's painting, #42, aptly titled, is a play on the answer to the universe referenced in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adam. Singularity is a light-absorbing black paint made with carbon Nano-tubes by NanoLab. This simple, stark Zen circle, made with the blackest paint on the planet, expresses the scientific experiences Chase had during his time at the laboratory. Typically, the circle represents the material world that continues endlessly without cessation. There is a beginning to life and an end, but this beginning and end continue one after the other, thereby signifying the wheel of birth, death and rebirth.

The moon, the sun, and the stars realize a grandeur that is evident in a circular language. Every understanding of the circle symbol meaning stems from that one moment of looking out from the eyes of the first human. From the life-giving solar orb, to its emotionally charged moon, the influence of circles is literally stellar, as it is cosmic and celestial. Irises and pupils of humankind's eyes are a microcosm of the circular nature of these grand kahuna's (sun/moon/earth, etc). Dark Matter explores our curiosity with this force field.