Jonathan VanDyke’s opulent sewn paintings fuse geometric pattern and expressive gesture. His works emerge through complex and prolonged processes of accumulating, mark-making, and piecing, often taking over a year to conceive and construct. Gathered from his family, friends, and companions, the fabrics that make up his paintings are stained and marked by way of techniques he first devised through long-term collaborations with performers from the NYC queer art community.

As VanDyke's"painting" brings together the Columbus region's textile and military histories with the most modern art practices, The Columbus Museum is proud to add this important work to its permanent collection holdings.

I'm thinking through your term queerfacture. Queerness is a way I'm embodied, a suffusion of my person reflected in the ways I make and do. It includes a lot of feelings that I can barely even touch and tendencies for which I can't find words. To live as queer is also to internalize all the acts of resistance and harm you've experienced, while gauging those you might yet face. Imagining and making and gathering differently – queerfacture – is a way of working through, letting go, transforming.

Specifically, we have selected two paintings by Jonathan VanDyke , who lives and works in New York, related to his latest series of works exhibited for the first time in the personal How to Operate in a Dark Room (Gallery 1 / 9unosunove, September-November 2019) . This type of works testify to the level of mastery achieved by the artist in the creation of sewn paintings.

Jonathan VanDyke’s 13-minute long video “Saints” could hardly be more different: it features images of feet walking over colorful scraps of cloth and a white, mask-like piece of paper covering a face, with the heavily made-up eyes peeking through.

Having known VanDyke’s work for almost a decade, I was struck by the multifaceted approach he took with research, performance and presentation. The exhibition consisted of two elements, two acts of looking: a 48-hour performance, during which VanDyke stood and observed 16 quilts, one at a time, for 3 hours each. All the quilts were selected by the artist from the museum’s collection. Simultaneously there was an exhibition curated by the artist with objects selected from the museum’s collection alongside his own paintings. 

Similarly, it’s the overlapping and sometimes complex inter- twining of studio setup, painting and photography that makes Jonathan VanDyke’s work so similarly hard to pin down. Known mostly for his paintings, which slowly drip paint onto the floor with a series of tubes hidden behind elaborately woven or constructed surfaces, photography has taken a more leading role in his practice, which employs his studio as a performative framework.

Scaramouche’s cramped storefront space at 53 Stanton Street is difficult to negotiate at the best of times, but Jonathan VanDyke’s exhibition “The Hole in the Palm of Your Hand” made an easy passage even more challenging than usual. While the five constructions in the show seemed at first well behaved, a closer look at each one—and a quick glance beneath it—revealed a substantially messier side.