Jacob Dahlgren

Jacob Dahlgren – Forward, Back, Right, Left

Dart boards, canned goods, plastic coffee mugs, striped shirts: the materials of Jacob Dahlgren's art come from the most quotidian of sources. Trained as an abstract painter, Dahlgren celebrates geometric patterns wherever he finds them. Early in his career he grew dissatisfied with the hard-edge abstractions he was painting, frustrated with making arbitrary decisions.

Instead of inventing new compositions, he began to replicate stripe patterns from T-shirts, painting their precise colors, thicknesses, and intervals in acrylic on board. He discovered a way to make other pictorial works by accumulating products, such as clothes pins, yogurt cups, or packages of dried food. Using found objects allowed him to expand into space, organizing elements selected from his environment into sculptures, installations, and performance. I, the World, Things, Life, is a signature work, demonstrating how Dahlgren creates occasions that we can experience as abstraction on the fly - an art moment within the flow of daily life. Some such moments are constructed: Demonstration and the performance Signes d'abstraction, screened in the museum lobby and elevator, document events where Dahlgren mobilized numerous collaborators to bring a richly aesthetic experience into public sites.

Other abstract opportunities are discovered by the perceptive artist. His photographic series Signs of Abstraction, projected in the adjacent gallery, samples his own experiences of finding stripes and other abstract patterns wherever he goes and capturing them with his camera. In fact, just to meet the artist is to encounter the wonderful world of abstraction - to quote another work - because Dahlgren wears a striped pullover every day, choosing from a collection that currently numbers more than one thousand.

Elizabeth A. Brown Chief Curator
Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Washington