Art Review: Unexpected elegance arises from abstraction

"A Single Scrap"

"Nothing Troubled Us"

Melissa Dunn's exhibition, "Looking for One Thing, Finding Another," at Dixon Gallery and Gardens through Jan. 14, exemplifies the nature of her work: that is, the search for a form and an expression the result of which may carry the artist far from her original intentions.

More than any show of abstraction that I have reviewed recently — this is the third in a three-part series that looks at five artists — Dunn's paintings reveal the process of their making in the track of her brush or other tool across the picture plane, whether the surface of canvas or paper or the metaphysical arena of the imagination. The necessarily improvisational and occasionally tentative nature of her enterprise is blatant in markings, lines and swaths, in broad strokes and narrow rills and in suggestions of unknown yet somehow remembered or stumbled-upon landscapes that solidify at the end of hard labor.

Spontaneity and improvisation do not imply a lack of confidence; as I pointed out in a review in March 2007 of a show of just six pieces at Material, Dunn's work reveals great confidence in her technique. In fact, what has primarily changed in the past 41/2 years is the gaining of a higher degree of inventiveness and willingness to take compositional and aesthetic risks. Not that every risk turns out a winner, as the casino billboards would have us believe, yet at least one of the gratifying results of Dunn's exhilarating sketchiness and experimentation is that not a single picture in this exhibition resembles another. This factor I ascribe not to lack of consistency but to a hand, eye and unconscious teeming with imagery.

Much of the passagework and choice of colors here, especially in the large paintings, imply devotion to childlike innocence or perhaps merely a vision of freshness and serenity; look, for example at the tranquil, sunny pinks, blues and golden yellows of "A Single Scrap," with its pastoral shapes and its aura of completion reduced to two imperfect — for paradise is never perfect — circles drawn almost in the center.

Also new, it seems to me, however, as a counter to this vision of innocence, is a sense of elegance hitherto lacking in Dunn's work, a trait that's cooler, a touch intellectual, almost beautiful. We observe this elegance mostly in the smaller mixed-media-on-paper works, a group that on the whole I find more resolved, more satisfying than the large paintings, though again I don't mind contradicting myself to say that the large piece called "Nothing Troubled Us," with its muted gray vertical stripes on the right and its sequence of miniature golden boxes on the left, keeps coming back to trouble my mind. Still, when it came time to snap a few images with my phone, it was smaller, centered and sophisticated pieces like "Ambler," "Take Up and Hold" and "Letting Go" that I wanted to take home. I suppose you could say that I went to this exhibition looking for one thing, but I found another.

Melissa Dunn, 'Looking for One Thing, Finding Another'

At Dixon Gallery and Gardens, 4339 Park, through Jan. 14. Call 761-5250.

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