Jesse Mockrin at Night Gallery

Night Gallery is thrilled to present The Progress of Love, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist
Jesse Mockrin. This will be her second solo exhibition with the gallery.

 
At a certain moment painting turned its eyes, without a trace of shame or pious moralizing, to the newly born world
of fashion. It basked in its own vanity, knowing for the first time its fickle caprice, its dazzling filigree of ever-change,
not as the mark of a fallen world, but as the very sign of lasting life. It’s no surprise that life itself was in fashion.
Butterflies, and seashells, and microscopes, and gardens overgrown and thick with uncertain desire. The whole
world was breaking up into perfect shimmering fragments, and the only thing left holding them in place was the
luminescent gravity of fascination. It would not be long before the deadening calm of certainty’s return. Sharp
revenge of the cosmological accountants, who would put everything in its rightful place. But for a brief moment, all
the signs of the world were sliding across its surfaces. Fleeting traction, then drift, and spin. Sometimes the stutter
of kaleidoscopic pastiche, others the slow, torsional rhythms of an oceanic fluidity, and everywhere the lush
perfume of pleasure’s promise. Perhaps painting above all others made itself into the image of that moment, tracing
the contours of a world as it flickered across the patterned damask of a fantastical dreamscape, plunged into
billowing