4 Artists | 4 Walls:

Interior Paintings

Madison Smith          Melanie Vote          Dan Witz          Jordan Wolfson

October 13 – November 6, 2004

DFN Gallery is pleased to present Interiors: 4 Artists: 4 Walls.  Madison Smith, Melanie Vote, Dan Witz and Jordan Wolfson, while approaching the subject matter differently, all convey a larger sense of time and place using a minimal amount of visual information. Intimate and subdued, they depict quiet fragments of interiors. No painter gives us the entire room.

Madison Smith’s wall-less dollhouse-like modules are viewed from above, reflecting the distance he now has from the surroundings of his childhood. Smith is drawn to the way inanimate objects, such as furniture, can serve as markers of

one’s life and live forever in one’s memory.

In her near white-on-white bathroom paintings, Melanie Vote combines utility with mystery to create subtly theatrical images.  Vote’s figures are captured in suspended animation, reinforcing a sense of cool detached voyeurism.

Dan Witz’s paintings of iconic lamps in oddly cropped lobby interiors dramatize the role of the mundane in establishing timelessness and anomie. Witz’s banal spaces suggest film noir scenes of improper dealings and illicit liaisons.

Walls dissolve in Jordan Wolfson's luminous rooms, emphasizing the abstract qualities of light and shadow, pigment and surface. Wolfson’s interiors, while thickly painted, remain airy and ethereal, bringing life to his everyday surroundings.

For more images by each artist, click on the images above.