DOPA MINE David Kaiser + SUBSTUDIO

Opening Reception | Saturday, February 15, 6-8 PM

This exhibition brings together paintings by David Kaiser and recent wall hangings by SUBSTUDIO (Hannah Dewhirst and Ingrid A Schmidt). Utilizing different mediums and approaches to making, these artists are aligned in their rigorous commitment to abstraction and experimentation. Transforming their chosen materials through additive or subtractive gestures, they create works that have a call and response relationship to each other, and share formal concerns including shape, line, color, and repetition.

Kaiser uses his Lexington studio to make abstractions that are the result of manipulating paint over time—dripping, layering, carving, and constructing. His finished paintings feature organic shapes and lush grounds, combining aspects of drawing and printmaking, plan and serendipity. In some works, color emanates from below the surface through deep grooves the artist cuts into dried acrylic slabs. Others feature thick chunks of paint, resembling fragments of rock, embedded on top of the canvas like geological samples. With his inventive approach to composition and mark-making, Kaiser demonstrates the elasticity of what "painting" can be.  

Schmidt and Dewhirst are co-founders of SUBSTUDIO, a Lexington-based collaborative design and research practice that utilizes hand-made processes along with digital fabrication, robotics, and factory production. Their tufted textiles attest to the wildly expressive potential of fiber: elaborate patterns emerge from the carefully "sculpted" wool pile, and calibrated shifts in color and texture work together to enhance the sense of dimensionality. Engaging the formal qualities of their materials, SUBSTUDIO offers viewers a seductively tactile experience of optical overload. 

The title of the exhibition is a play on the word "Dopamine," a neurotransmitter in the brain that acts as a messenger between nerve cells and the rest of the body. It plays a role in memory, attention, motivation, and mood; and is known as the “feel good” hormone. For our purposes, the broken word connects to notions of experimentation, cognition, and visual pleasure.