Jakob Dwight - Maus Contemporary

SOLARWIND IN ARRAY, artist Jakob Dwight's second one-person exhibition with the gallery, presents a kind of naturalist abstraction that takes on mythopoetic or psychic landscape feel.

Dwight's paintings reference imaging overall in an era of advanced viewing that allows humankind to see things we've never seen before: MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), X-ray, satellite photography of our own planet and our universe, microscopy and computer models of wind or ocean currents and fluid dynamics.
A continuation of the themes of his recent one-person exhibition "A Trillion Verses" at the Wiregrass Museum in Dothan, Alabama, the paintings in "Solarwind in Array" are visual letters from the artist to the first ancestral naturalists - the first human observers and artists - relaying some of what we now know about our universe, the wonders of what surrounds us and is within us all at all times.
Most simply described as an ode to or a praising of the Sun, the exhibition title "Solarwind in Array" is a heliocentric expression for how our experience and biological life overall might poetically be described: as electromagnetic energized wind from the sun speeding through our sphere where it slows for eons and is temporarily superorganized into a beautiful and vast array of forms before eventually dissipating back out into the ever-expanding universe.

And perhaps consciousness itself could be described as an instance of 'solarwind in array' in that one theory of what consciousness could be - and scientists barely know what it is - is the interplay of the electromagnetic field and our brain and its array of trillions of neurons and synapses.

Originally trained as a painter, US born and based artist Jakob Dwight was drawn to digital art and software as an opportunity to explore the impact of digital media on the painterly perspective. Inspired by the opiated, meditative quality of the screen-based televisual space, in 1999 the artist saw the exploration of the illuminated image as significant to contemporary sensory culture and produced his first digital works in that year.

Described by intermedia art pioneer Claudia Hart as a classical romantic, Dwight's work often examines properties of the natural world like compression, scale, complexity in noise/turbulence (ie: fractalism), and the birth and evolution of form, often presenting deceptively simple and timeless seed or ovule forms.

A survivor of a (noncancerous) childhood brain tumor, Dwight's images often reference neurological or biological forms and imagery. In these ways the artist seeks to embrace the universality of the art experience through an iconic visual poesy, an emotive appreciation of physics and the natural world. Now, after almost 25 years of creating works almost solely through digital processes, the artist has returned to painting, extracting and layering images from his archives of computer assisted or generated images. In Dwight's paintings, the uniquely light-based art trope called the afterimage - the image that remains temporarily in a viewer’s mind after looking away from an original image - is introduced to painting.

Again, asking: What can painting learn from 50 years of digital art, more than a century of film, cinematography and the post-photographic era?

Dwight's work has been presented internationally, including in Amsterdam, Paris, Los Angeles, Berlin, Seattle, Atlanta, Vienna, Salzburg, and New York. In 2012 he exhibited in Kassel, Germany as part of the Kreuzberg Pavillon at dOCUMENTA (13). The same year, he was awarded the Harvestworks New Works Residency in New York. In 2010, Dwight was invited to attend the GlogauAIR Artist's Residency in Germany, and in the following year, he was awarded a United States Artist's Residency.

As part of the Aesthetics + Therapeutics Lab, a collectively run platform developed to initiate installations and experiments in immersive art and healing, Dwight installed a multi-sensory environment at the Vortex Immersion Media Dome at LA Center Studios in 2014.

He was commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum to create new work for the exhibition Disguise: Masks and Global African Art at UCLA's Fowler Museum, which traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, New York in April 2016.

	Jakob Dwight "Flowers of Air"
Jakob Dwight An Anterior Silent Vocal 2024 acrylic on canvas 60 by 48 in. (ca. 152,4 by 122 cm)	Jakob Dwight Flowers of Air 2024 acrylic on canvas 60 by 48 in. (ca. 152,4 by 122 cm)