Pareidolia
Jane Swavely

GALLERY I

October 15 - November 13, 2022

Opening reception: Saturday, October 15 from 6–8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Pareidolia, an exhibition of abstract oil on canvas paintings by Jane Swavely, and the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. Pareidolia borrows its title from the psychological tendency to find meaning in amorphous visual stimuli, perceiving familiar patterns and objects where there are none. Of deep folkloric significance, pareidolia has been observed across time—in infants as young as eight months and rhesus monkeys, as well as in artificial neural networks.

While Swavely’s earlier abstractions engaged with the art-historical tradition of landscape painting, her most recent works shirk the genre’s orienting horizon line in favor of an internal structure: low-profile stretcher bars leave their grid and cross-like impressions on the paintings’ canvas surfaces like stone rubbings. Fields of color made up of energetic brushstrokes intersect with striations produced by wood and weight. Working with her canvases laid out on the floor, Swavely lets gravity partake in their making, lending her paintings an insistent object-ness. As much frame as facade, Swavely’s paintings become multistable images, screens, or portals.

Swavely paints intuitively, giving her works the freshness of provisionality, like thoughts permitted to come and go unbothered. Swathes of noxious greens, warming oranges, and sharp silvers are set against areas where paint has been wiped from the surface, revealing undertones and vestigial forms. Together they produce a sense of transparency and luminosity, as though the paintings are lit from within. The viewer looks both at and through Swavely’s paintings at once, seeing in the moon both hare and crater.

Pareidolic phenomena are matters of the mind’s eye, encounters between desire and reality. The latter might be likened to a waiting screen, the former the picture we project upon it. In embracing both, Swavely’s paintings dance on the edge of matter and meaning, what is and what might be.

Jane Swavely studied at Boston University and the School of Visual Arts in New York and is the recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship. Her work is in numerous public and private collections, including the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection and the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania. Previously represented by CDS Gallery in New York, Swavely was a long-time New York Member at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, and recently transitioned to being an Adjunct Member. Her most recent solo show, Jinx, took place in November 2018. 

Swavely has shown in solo exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery, CDS Gallery, the New Arts Program in Kutztown, PA, Loyola College in Baltimore, and the Mandeville Gallery at Union College in Schenectady, NY, as well as in group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Nashville, and abroad. Her work has been featured in Two Coats of Paint, Cultbytes, Art Spiel, The Christian Science Monitor, and The American Scholar.

View the Press Release here.

View Jane Swavely’s page here.

Recent Press:

Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, “In Between and Around”, Cultbytes, January 17, 2023, https://cultbytes.com/in-between-and-around/.

Public Program

Poetry Reading from "No Chronology" by Karen Fish

Sunday, November 6, 4 PM

A.I.R. Gallery

Learn more here.

Photography: Sebastian Bach