Artist: Jessica Cannon

GAVLAK West Palm Beach presents Eternal Geometries, a solo exhibition of new works by Brooklyn-based artist Jessica Cannon. Marking her debut at the gallery, the exhibition delves into Cannon’s exploration of imagined landscapes that shift between concrete topographies and geometric abstractions.

Cannon’s work is defined by semi-abstract compositions that explore the inherent instability of form and representation. While her imagery often invokes mountain landscapes and celestial bodies, such representations remain fluid and ever-changing. The spiral form, a recurring motif in her oeuvre, exemplifies this instability, as it deliberately blurs the scale and boundaries of representation. By drawing viewers into indeterminate spaces, Cannon’s images encourage a renegotiation of our relationship with the world and those around us. This persistent instability reveals the central motif of her practice: the unceasing change of the world, or motion itself—a concept she describes as “transcendental forms.” Her paintings examine “the durational aspect of something that takes a form, changes, and dissolves into a field.”

Cannon enhances the spatial dimensions of her work by giving careful attention to the temporal dynamism of color. To create images that shift and shimmer over time, she employs iridescent pigments in her underpaintings, which she then overlays with lace-like patterns of color, reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s infinity nets. These color combinations emerge from studies that are both rigorously grounded in scientific empiricism and fluid in their intuitive approach. The result is a wavelike, durational quality in the interplay of colors on the picture surface. As time passes and the gallery light shifts, Cannon’s paintings seem to transform, captivating viewers in the flow of time and the extension of space. Many of the works in this exhibition, including Suspension (2024), mark Cannon’s exploration of larger-scale painting, which she notes “gives shapes room to expand and colors to play.”

Cannon’s work resonates with the enduring legacy of female artists who have explored the interplay between representation and abstraction, including Hilma af Klint, Georgia O'Keeffe, Judy Chicago, and Agnes Pelton. Spanning various techniques of abstraction, accumulation, and representation, this lineage challenges the dichotomy between rationality and intuition—a construct often employed in art-historical discourse to uphold patriarchal hegemony. Cannon continues a tradition of painting that is both rational and intuitive, destabilizing historical categories of artistic production and gender. For example, she describes her lace-like markmaking practice as simultaneously meditative and intentionally present. While the repetition of gestures induces a trance-like state, Cannon complements this with a meticulous attention to color to achieve her desired effects. Her practice, then, draws upon a rich history to enact a feminist mode of painting that resists reduction to either intuition or rationality alone.

The works on view highlight the precision and subtlety of Cannon’s techniques, as well as their ability to immerse spectators in their world. By anchoring us in the fluid interplay of form and color, Cannon invites a reassessment of our material and historical orientations.