REBECCA PARTRIDGE

Dusk, Dawn, Day

April 17 th - May 22nd, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday April 19th, 6 - 8pm

WORKS

Over the past decade, Rebecca Partridge has been painting her abstractions of the sky. Her Sky Paintings—human-scale canvases layered with translucent watercolors that create subtly shifting veils of color—are an ongoing series that started in the Mojave Desert in 2015. These works have never been painted from photographs or en plein air. Instead, the artist spends her time under the sky quite simply observing. Later, beneath the roof of her London studio, she records the impression of her memory that the dawn, dusk or daylight has left on her. 

Naturally, such an impression is filtered through the artist’s own embodied experience in a number of stages: first the eyes that see, then the mind that processes and remembers, and finally the body that executes the paintings themselves at a physically demanding scale. The fact that we experience and recall the world first and foremost through our bodies has long been the concern of artists and philosophers alike. More recently, psychologist Barbara Tversky posited that movement, rather than language, is the foundation of human cognition. 

In this exhibition Dusk, Dawn, Day presented in Los Angeles—images of Partridge’s embodied memories form a continuous landscape with a palpable rhythm of their own. They are subtly yet unmistakably imbued with the traces of the physical process of remembering. 

The correlation between observation, memory and what might be described as visual transcription is never a watertight one. Though Partridge doesn’t insert herself into these images in any conscious or intentional way, she is always there as a kind of spectral presence; passive but nonetheless present. As such, these paintings come to represent an inextricable combination of the environment itself and the artist’s sensation of it. 

Though inescapably personal, Partridge’s Sky Paintings come to communicate something universal. Namely, they speak to the fundamental way in which all of our experiences of the world are mediated through interpretation and memory. They stand tall as monuments to our varied impressions of the world around us. 

- Phin Jennings