Jackie Tileston: Phenomorama

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas, Texas is pleased to announce the opening of, Phenomorama, an exhibition of new multi-media paintings and works on paper by Jackie Tileston. An opening reception for the artist will be held Saturday, September 6^th from 5:00 to 8:00 pm. The exhibition continues through October 11^th, 2008.

In Phenomorama, Jackie Tileston brings a global sensibility to her work by drawing from many different cultures. Her cosmopolitan background lends authority to her painterly affirmations of the medium's innate capacity to absorb, transform and interpret the global nature of contemporary society. Tileston’s trans-cultural life journey has taken her from her birthplace of the Philippines to Philadelphia, where she currently is a Professor of painting at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tileston has compared her creative process to a B-movie monster, devouring everything in its path and becoming weirder, stronger and more complex as it progresses. This description of the artist as an eater and synthesizer of culture, or cultures, applies especially well to Tileston, who has lived in so many different places and perhaps always felt a bit alien; as more of an observer than a participator. She has spent months at a time living in India and Italy, absorbing the cultural influences and gathering pictorial material, motifs and inspiration for her recent paintings.

Dense areas of vivid color and imagery exist alongside nebulous dustings of powdered pigment and expanses of bare linen, creating opulent and sophisticated surfaces. Into this wide spectrum, the artist also overlaps recognizable fragments of Chinese landscape painting, with transfers of French wallpapers and rustic panoramas from art history directly onto the surface.

She received a B.A. from Yale University in 1983, an M.F.A. from Indiana University in 1988, and was a Core Fellow in the residency program of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 1988-1990. In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 2004 a PEW Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2005 she was honored with a Bellagio Residency in Italy from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2005 the Dallas Museum of Art acquired a painting for their collection.

Her work has appeared in exhibition venues such as University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, University of Texas in San Antonio, Longview Museum of Art in Texas, Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Philadelphia Art Alliance in Pennsylvania, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, ArtPace in San Antonio, Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Galveston Art Center in Texas, McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.