Ali Dipp: Unceasing Change and Everlasting Duration

About

Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present Ali Dipp: Unceasing Change and Everlasting Duration, the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. In this new body of work, Dipp re-presents six works from the history of landscape painting leading up to the Civil War, incorporating thread on denim to create what the artist refers to as “thread paintings.”

Commenting on her references to the Hudson Valley School, central to the show, the artist writes:

Walking under the dappling shade of maples and birches, I visited the Hudson Valley this past summer with two close friends. We arrived at the base of the switchback road leading to the estate of Frederic Edwin Church, the nineteenth-century landscape painter. Before ascending, I glanced to my left, where the matrixed orange lights of a roadside message board spelled out: “THERE IS HOPE”. Despite its utilitarian format, the phrase read in my mind as “There IS hope!” — as if recognizing something that had been there all along. 

My interest in hope’s enduring power began when I first encountered Church’s “Our Banner in the Sky” beneath the scuffed laminated cover of Angela Miller’s textbook on nineteenth-century landscape painting. Church’s image, which I reference in the largest piece in this show, depicts a flag rendered in blazing cloud cover. He painted it in 1861, the year the Civil War began. The painting continues to stir perennial questions: Is it a sunrise or a sunset? Is it a moving image, because of its fragility: a sky that disappears as quickly as it forms? Do clouds best approximate the endless change that renders America so difficult to describe? 

When I make my denim works in El Paso, on the southwestern border, America remains at once pictured and perpetually out of reach: a vision on the horizon where the light has yet to cast its full color. The grandeur of the Hudson can feel remote as I drive past the industrial buildings on Texas Street. 

While the immensity of Thomas Cole’s “A Wild Scene” (1831-32) might feel vast because of its remove, when I re-presented the painting in my studio, I felt a certain closeness to its farthest vantage. Like Cole, I labor for the promise beyond the picture’s frame. Much like these historical figures labored, I too feel compelled to work, since hope forever implores effort. When I worked through Asher B. Durand’s bleached horizon in “The Beeches” (1845), its precipice awash with light, I recognized the painting’s distant glow. Though it depicts a place I know little about, the horizon’s flinting brightness feels familiar, because to look at the world anew is precisely what I feel when I work. Much like these historical figures labored, I too feel compelled to work, since hope forever implores effort. When I look at the nineteenth-century paintings referenced here, I don’t just see landscapes—I see paintings made to ennoble a vision, images that sought to represent a young country’s potential. What became of these paintings—and their hope—took many forms. 

Despite the immense unknowns beyond reach, the splintering light reminds me of a world ablaze in its roiling brilliance: unceasing in change, everlasting in duration. 

-Ali Dipp, April 2025, El Paso, TX