Way Down in the Green Woods: Dylan Rose Rheingold

About

As the eldest daughter of a first-generation Japanese American mother and Jewish American father, Rheingold’s work is influenced by her multi-cultural familial history, personal narratives, and traditions of portraiture. Rheingold has been developing a signature style of figuration that began with nostalgic portraits and scenes from family photo albums, but has expanded into an untethered and ardent exploration of otherness.

The tradition of family portraiture varies across cultures, but there is something unified in the composition, postures, and posing of this photographic pastime. The snapshot is a moment in time, a record, a remembrance. In her works, Rheingold uses photographic source material as seed for her expressionistic imagery to blossom from. These evocative portraits give us a glimpse into the characters unique lives and reflect on histories that are divergent from the status quo of American ideologies.

All too often “the other” is represented through a lens of alienation, oppression, or exoticization. Rheingold expands the narrative of otherness to be polymorphic, and inclusive of everyday lived experience. The figures in Rheingold’s paintings and drawings occupy a colorful pictorial space, speckled with cultural symbolism from the artist’s family heritage. Steeped in an air of nostalgia and loaded with layers of mark-making, these works go beyond their source materials to make them into something more visceral.

Rheingold’s studio process involves the layering of acrylic, oil, china marker, pastel, charcoal, spray paint, marker, and ink onto canvas. The accumulated palimpsest of the painted surface is rich in coloration and form, bringing the figures into a raw and existence on the canvas. Her expressionistic approach is reminiscent of a long lineage of painters like Philip Guston, Alice Neel, and George Grosz while also honing in on her style into something that is distinctively her own. Together the works in this exhibition presents a kaleidoscope of stories about memory, difference, feminity, and ancestral roots.