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JEREMY THOMAS | Of Our Own Making

August 7 - September 5, 2026

Opening Reception with the Artist: Friday, August 7th, 5-7 p.m.

The challenge is there in the title: Of Our Own Making. The person who enters the gallery is entreated to become an active participant in the perception and understanding of the art objects found within. Life asks this of us every day - but it is art that so often provides the space, the paring down, the intensity of focus, which allows us to notice internally where we are stuck, where preconceived ideas interfere with perceptions. Art says: pay attention to your prejudices. Take responsibility for your vision. See with the artist. Bring your full self, your personal history, your emotion and knowledge, with full awareness, into the gallery with you. All that you are, the world itself, will shape your experience.

But these sculptures challenge us in more ways than one. Those familiar with the work of Jeremy Thomas will expect the folded and puckered forms of his inflated cold-rolled steel - but these forms are prickly. Spined, bristled. Their weight balanced precariously on points, and reaching outward and upward with thorny edges. The human brain is wired for a wariness of spikey things, and so these new sharp forms challenge our bias - even as the sumptuousness of their glossy colors and allure of their velvety-textured rust patina, seduce us to come near, get closer.

Deep, brilliant, and intense - the colors saturate the eye. Midnight blue. Iron-rich red. A green that shimmers with depths of blue and violet. A rich, coagulated pink. The palette choices and saturation set the stage for an experience of color that is complex and shifting. An experience of color that pulls and leads the viewer to move around and explore the sculptures closely.

But those spikey forms! Whereas at first we might find a warning in the shapes - soon they begin to feel familiar. Reassuring. Thomas notes that this new exploration of spiny forms began in 2025, and initially came from encountering the bright green, pointed holly leaves in otherwise barren hedgerows on bleak January walks in Wales. Back in New Mexico in his studio, as he explored and worked with these shapes, he realized that "all the pokey things in the world are pokey for a reason..." Plants and creatures evolve spines and spikes, sometimes for protection, but also sometimes so that their seeds can stick to something and be disseminated far and wide. New life from a spikey beginning.

These remarkable new pieces are not the only new explorations that Thomas brings to Of Our Own Making. Also included are a series of small sculptural objects that were printed on a 3D printer from translucent polycarbonate material. These works represent a whole other avenue of exploration for Thomas, utilizing a material that has long fascinated him, and exploring the use of digital technology to create his forms. These forms are lobed and radiant. If the steel sculptures are spikey sea creatures or seed pods - these are nacreous shells or transparent invertebrates. Thomas hand paints the forms, leaving many of the forms' sides translucent and a few opaque. The effect is a luminous confusion of shape and color, a silvery shimmer that seems to contain several stops along the color spectrum. It can be hard to pin down where a curve ends or an edge begins due to the particular quality of the material and how light interacts with pigment.

The challenge here, from Thomas' perspective, is the use of new technologies. It is important, he says, to see digital technology as another useful tool in art-making, but not to give it more weight than it warrants. As he says, "It’s just another tool. It’s just another technique and realm to explore. I think in our digital age, we forget the reason why we make. And how important our human experience is in that making process."

Perhaps this is the final challenge presented in Of Our Own Making. The culmination of these disparate new works is an understanding of Thomas' own stance as an artist in the world; constantly engaging, questioning and bringing those experiences, those discoveries, back into the studio where he interprets and integrates them. It is clear, walking through the gallery, that artmaking is how Thomas makes sense of the world. Whether it is the silken slide of light across one of his new 3D printed pieces, or the way that his spiky forms "catch" you with their spines, beneath it all, Thomas demonstrates to us a way to be in the world.

- Michaela Kahn, Ph.D.

Jeremy Thomas, Ilex Green, 2026, cold rolled steel, powder coat, and urethane, 24 x 25 x 21 inches

PARD MORRISON | EVERLOVE

July 3 - August 1, 2026

Opening Reception with the Artist: Friday, July 3rd, 5-7 p.m.

PARD MORRISON | EVERLOVE

July 3 - August 1, 2026

Opening Reception with the Artist: Friday, July 3rd, 5-7 p.m.

It is best to let yourself slowly wander through the gallery once, then circle back and walk through again, even more slowly. As the viewer engages with them in physical space, these painted sculptures radiate a sensation of aliveness, a persistent "beingness." Walking among the columns (ranging from 6 to 10 feet tall) in particular, almost feels like moving through a group of people, or through a forest of tall trees. Move close. Look closer. They seem almost to be speaking to you.

The language of Pard Morrison's painted sculptures, whether the columns, cubes, or the stacked box wall piece included in this exhibition, is a complex interplay of minimal elements. There is the architectural nature of these 3/16" plate aluminum pieces, precisely cut and welded into geometric volumes. There is the juxtaposition of this industrial fabrication with the fact that, as the viewer notices on close inspection - the myriad colors of industrial Flouronar paint across the surface have been applied by hand. The marks of Morrison's brushwork remain visible, belying that veneer of industrial "perfection" that they may seem to have from a distance. The colors themselves are painted across the surfaces as if the sculpture was a canvas in elaborate patterns of shapes and bands and puzzle pieces.

It is this interweave of pattern and color - the groupings, rhythms, contrasts and emotional freight of the colors themselves that seem to form the most complex aspects of Morrison's sculptural language. Morrison has spoken about color as providing a form of "emotional architecture" within his works. His sense of the emotional and psychological, as well as the aesthetic qualities of color is utilized to create dialogue and movement across the planes of these surfaces.

For example, the interlocking diamonds and triangles of the 6 ft. column draw the eye upward, while the alternating of brighter and more saturated colors with softer, lighter hues creates a rhythm for the eye of movements and pauses. Meanwhile the cube utilizes irregular and overlapping shapes, and the appearance of a thin black bar and small orange rectangle seem almost like notations, or punctuation, against the larger pale gray-blue shapes of the piece. Added to all of this is that changes in the light and atmosphere, of the angle at which the viewer is approaching the piece, will cause shifts in the colors, softening, deepening, altering the way they interact with each other.

Each of these aspects of the work can be taken in turn: the traces of Morrison's "imperfect" mark making, the human-sized volumes of the pieces, the chance of light and season, the patterning, geometries, puzzle-like weaving, the emotionality, movement, and energy created by the colors. But the magic truly happens when the viewer begins to take in the relationships between all these disparate aspects, to see the whole.

Not surprisingly, Morrison has an affinity for the work of the nature poet Mary Oliver. He says that one particular quote has stayed with him for years, "Attention is the beginning of devotion." It is an apt quote. Life is at root an interplay between order (structure, repetition, reproducible rules and laws of biology and physics) and chaos (the genetic slip, the missed connection, the butterfly flapping its wings). What minimalism does so well, what Morrison is offering with his work, is to strip out the extraneous, leaving behind a composition that provides a more accessible entry point for humans to slow down and practice attention. To see. To see how infinitely complex even one tiny space, one piece of art, can be. The relationships ripple out from there.

Everlove offers the viewer a chance to slow down. To see differently. To begin to learn a language made of color and shape, of space and light. To feel the significance of the human hand amid a world of tech and noise. As Morrison says: "I believe that mark making is a form of prayer. My work is an accumulation of prayers."

- Michaela Kahn, Ph.D.

JOHN BEECH: ACROSS THE SURFACE

May 29 – June 27, 2026

Opening Reception with the Artist: Friday, May 29th, 5-7 PM

“A Conversation with John Beech and David Chickey”

Saturday, May 30, 2026, from 2-4 PM

JOHN BEECH |ACROSS THE SURFACE

May 29 – June 27, 2026

Opening Reception with the Artist: Friday, May 29th, 5-7 PM

“A Conversation with John Beech and David Chickey”

Saturday, May 30, 2026, from 2-4 PM

They are not just black and white photos. The subject matter is urban: city streets, industrial sites, alleyways, warehouse facades. Within them is the accumulated flotsam and jetsam of human life in a city: dumpsters, random pieces of abandoned furniture, bits construction equipment. But each photo is also ground for the artist's intervention. In some pieces like Photo-Painting #202, Berlin, paint covers over the shape of what might, in another context, be called the "subject" of the photo - blue brushstrokes coating a hexagonal dumpster. In others, like Photo Painting #193, Del Monte Center, Monterey, thick goldenrod paint covers over the entire background of the image, stripping away context. In still others, like Faux-brick Dumpster, 52nd Street, Manhattan, the interventions take a different tact, with marks of red as well as tape, staples, and ink scratched across the surface.

We humans take things for granted: a street, a chair, the passage of time. Wandering the world with our heads bent down over our phones, lost inside a digital, two-dimensional maze of news and noise, our senses and bodies left behind, our minds overwhelmed by information, how long since we really experienced that alley, that tree, that sky?

This is the opportunity that art grants us: a chance to realign ourselves, reconnect with our senses and our proprioceptive experience of moving through the world. Art, aesthetic experience, lights up multiple regions of our brains, including the default mode network that normally only runs during introspective moments like daydreaming or memory. It is a truly unique state that allows humans to thrive. As Susan Magsamen of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine says, "In fact, the science shows we’re neurobiologically wired for these kinds of experiences, and they contribute to our health and well-being." Art complexifies and connects us with the world.

The Photo-Paintings and Monotypes of John Beech do just this. They challenge our preconceptions, providing the jolt, the pause, that invites us to pay closer attention. These works confound our sense of what a photo is, what a painting is, and how we see art and the world. Across the Surface provides a survey of Beech's Photo-Paintings and Monotypes from across the decades and dovetails with the announcement of a new book about this particular body of work forthcoming from Radius Books in spring 2027.

The series of work that became the Photo-Paintings evolved over about a decade. Beech first studied photography while at school at UC Berkeley in 1986. In the late 90's when Beech moved to New York City, he began to take photos of the industrial streets of Brooklyn, mostly as a way to get to know his new home. During that time, he stumbled on the faux-brick dumpster in Manhattan, as he says, "trying to camouflage itself against a brick wall." That photo inspired his particular interest in photographing dumpsters. It resonated with the container sculpture work that he was already doing which merged a minimalist aesthetic influenced by Judd and Serra, with a "basic utility vernacular." Beech found dumpsters fascinating for their unique placement within human life and landscape. As he says, "A dumpster on the street has a certain insistent presence and right to be, wherever it is found. I liked this conviction and found it all the more intriguing that a dumpster concurrently tends to be overlooked, not noticed."

This way of describing the ubiquitous dumpster provides a bit of a skeleton key into Beech's work. Beech's art seems to dance along the edge of this particular dynamic, bridging categories and seeming opposites: high and low, familiar and strange, old and new, clear and hidden, homely and aesthetic, painting and photo. It brings together expected and unexpected in ways that allow the viewer to see anew and to experience a whole beyond the sum of these disparate parts.

Across the Surface brings together a broad view of Beech's work from forty years. Coming into the gallery from the streets outside (asphalt, train tracks, traffic lights, adobe facades), the viewer has the chance to put away her phone, take a deep breath, and feel for that spark of connection to ignite from the aesthetic contradictions and surprises that Beech has created. Sink in. Who knows how this might change you? As Beech has said, "Art is a meditation on the nature of reality and therefore not an act of distraction from reality."

- Michaela Kahn, Ph.D.

Photo-Painting #201, Olmsted Road, Monterey, 2023, oil enamel, digital photograph, canvas, wood panel, 24.25 x 30 x 1.75 inches

A WHITER SHADE OF PALE: A GROUP EXHIBITION

April 4 - May 5, 2026

RONALD DAVIS: THE POLAR SERIES

March 6 -31, 2026

Opening Reception: Friday, March 6th, 5-7 PM

Gallery Talk: "A Conversation, Remembering Ron Davis" with guest panelists Barbara Davis, Ron Cooper, Jim Grant, and Gary Wong

Saturday, March 7th, 2-4 PM

RONALD DAVIS: THE POLAR SERIES

March 6 -31, 2026

Opening Reception: Friday, March 6th, 5-7 PM

Gallery Talk: "A Conversation, Remembering Ron Davis"

with guest panelists Barbara Davis, Ron Cooper, Jim Grant, and Gary Wong

Saturday, March 7th, 2-4 PM

These discs of brilliant and confounding color are alluringly tactile. There is an itch in the palm, a desire to smooth one's hand over the curved edges of the tondos, across their abstract, colorful geometries. The rounded edges and glossy surfaces underscore the lived experience of Ronald Davis’s last series of work, The Polar Series, as objects rather than, in a more classical and rarified sense, paintings. Mounted atop diamond shaped canvases, the inner tondos tug at the viewer, zeroing one's vision center-ward with their bullseye-like attraction.

Charlotte Jackson Fine Art is honored to present a selection of pieces from Ronald Davis's final body of work, The Polar Series, including the very last painting that Davis completed a few days before his death, Timer.

We tend to freight last's (words, books, works) with an especial level of meaning that might not always be warranted. However, it is difficult to look at Timer and not see a sort of cipher, a work of art where all of Davis's accumulated insights, tools, and affinities are on display. With its alternating stripes of blue and orange to one side, green and orange to the other, the piece is split by a wider, bifurcated band between them. In this off-center band a very Ronald Davis brand of illusion comes into play - using nested shapes and color value in the lower portion to create the impression of depth, where blues deepen to dark blue-green, and using classical two-point perspective above to create a sort of doorway of red onto a vista of green. Set strikingly against its black diamond background, the whole is composed of opposites coming into and out of balance.

The Polar Series is the result of a return to painting by Davis beginning in June of 2021. At that point he had not painted on canvas for about 15 years, focused instead primarily on his computer generated Pixel Dust works. Davis's initial foray with a rectangular format quickly shifted when, as he says, "as I worked, the desire to “find the center” became my mission." He drew inspiration from a 1963 tondo, Target, which with its alternate-colored, light and dark bullseye seemed an apt format to explore, as he puts it, the "opposite poles of light-dark, black-white, up-down."

Davis holds an important space in the history of art in the 20th century with his perception-bending use of perspective and exploration of cutting-edge technologies. His use of perspective to "excavate walls" ran contrary to the post-modernist predilection for emphasizing the flatness of the two-dimensional painting surface. However, as Davis said in a quote from the 1980's, via art writer Penny Hawks: "I embrace the traditions of 20th century abstract painting. In fact, I have always remained in the Clement Greenberg dialogue of post-painterly abstraction. I have also been influenced by minimalism. But the emptiness of classical minimalism was never enough for me, nor were Clem’s theatrical axioms. I had to make it beautiful."

The use of a second, diamond canvas to "frame" the inner tondos of the Polar Series seems, at first, almost to undercut the very work that Davis did as part of the post-modern project to unhook painting from its formal framing. But in fact, as Davis himself noted, these mountings manage, with an almost humorous, Duchampian eye-wink, to widen that gap. As he says, "I mounted the circles on square backings tipped 45 degrees as diamonds, to better define their objecthood..."

This choice is itself a part of the complex interweaving of paradoxes that run throughout The Polar Series. Warm versus cool, high energy versus low energy, flat versus deep, curved versus squared. These opposites interact, war, and at times resolve within each piece. These works seem ultimately to be as much about the science and experience of human perceptions as they are about the history and technology of art-making. This is the multifaceted and unsettled truth of human life, the realm of experience that the poet Keats dubbed "negative capability." And yet what these paintings do is take that richness of seeming conflict and irresolution and to refine it. To unfold the convoluted not by solving it, but by illuminating it. Here is, perhaps, where that "beauty"Davis strived for arises. As David Hickey so aptly put it in his essay, "Ronald Davis Is Not Doing What You're Seeing" from 2015: "The idea is not to seduce but to render something complex plain."

This, more than anything, when combined with another quote from Ronald Davis, seems to form the perfect cipher and epitaph for Davis's body of work, and in particular the pieces presented here in The Polar Series. "I am but a box in time and space. I am content to become one with the cosmos."

- Michaela Kahn, Ph.D.

Image: Frank Stella – RIP, 2024, acrylics on prepared 30-inch diameter circular canvas mounted on 40 x 40 in. canvas

DAVID SIMPSON: PAINTINGS

January 10 - February 7, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 10th, 2-4 PM

DAVID SIMPSON: PAINTINGS

January 10 - February 7, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 10th, 2-4 PM

In winter the sun seems far away. The days are shorter, the nights colder, the days darkened by clouds and storms. In that darkness, we humans often seek light: the flicker of candle flame, the sparkle of slanting sun on snow, the glow of a hearth fire. Something in our nature turns us toward light like flowers tracking the sun from east to west. We have our own phototrophic natures.

Artists, too, follow the light. So much of the artistic exploration of the later 20th century was about paring back – striping work down to essential factors like color, space, and light. Particularly, light. Some used actual bulbs to paint with colored light. Some sought to attract light with gleaming surfaces, some used glass, playing with transparency. Artists, on their side, were testing out the possibilities and qualities of light much like scientists were doing with equations and experiments.

David Simpson is one of these artists who was captivated by light. His encounter with newly developed forms of metallic and interference acrylic paints in the late 1980’s were a game-changer. The interference paints contain microscopic particles of mica coated in titanium dioxide. These particles, like a thousand thousand tiny mirrors, reflect and refract light from within the paint itself. So light, hitting even a thin coating of this paint, becomes caught within, sparking, bouncing, changing wavelength, and therefore color, as it moves through this thinnest of three-dimensional surfaces. Simpson worked for years to perfect his use of these paints, developing his own unique trowel for application, and a technique that involves up to thirty layers of paint. Within these multiple thin layers, the particles sit, waiting to bounce light back and forth between them.

The result are paintings that are never still, never finished becoming. They shine and glow, they shift and shimmer. The color you see facing you one moment will not be the same as the color you see when the sun shifts, or the angle of your view changes.

In Paintings, the viewer can view a collection of Interference paintings by Simpson from over the course of four decades. Ranging from the massive 6-foot diameter Tondos to the small 6x6-inch squares, these pieces shine and shift as the viewer moves around them.

The Tondos are large enough to feel almost like portals into a world of pure color. The depths and roil of purple in Violet Idyl contrast with the elegant golden orange of Cyprian Tondo. A piece like Rosa Reverso shifts dramatically from a subtle, dusty rose-mauve to a shining gold, while a piece like Over & Under Lavender seems to shift through every possible permutation of the color. The smaller works, move differently but still shift and shine remarkably. From the greeny undertones within the copper sheen of Yellow Copper 6 to the moody aqua of Ryder 6 or the frosted and shadowed orchid-magenta Small Universe, these pieces present a continuing evolution of colors.

The viewer moves along with this mysterious inner-shifting of light and shadow. We follow the glint, dive into the dark, ride along the tide of shifting hues. Our phototrophic selves move through the gallery like flowers tracking sun.

David Simpson: Paintings brings a gallery full of color and light into the dark of winter in Santa Fe.

- Michaela Kahn, Ph.D.

Pictured: David Simpson, Cyprian Tondo, 1990, acrylic on canvas, 72 inch diameter

Winter Solstice: A Group Exhibition

December 5, 2025 - January 4, 2026

HELEN PASHGIAN

October 10 - November 10, 2025

HELEN PASHGIAN

October 10 - November 10, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, October 10th, 5 -7 PM

It isn’t the how that draws you in. Even if these color-saturated, luminous sculptures do boggle the brain – there is something beyond how that challenges our perception, pulls us in, makes us step closer, look deeper.

Each small, seven-inch sphere calls us to fall into it, to see something more that must be hidden within its deep colors. There is something enigmatic in the curved column of shaded turquoise within deep turquoise that casts shadow and shape. Something unexpected in the cubed tunnel of clear transparent material that provides a window into the core of a brilliant orange piece.

The darkly lit and rippled square wall pieces offer impossible windows which seem to glow from within. Some contain what appear like rips within darkly luminous surfaces which reveal glowing, flickering yellow cores. Another seems to ripple light and shadow in complex waves like water or fire.

As a key member of the Light & Space movement, Helen Pashgian’s sculpture explores the possibilities of light, color and volume, using materials from cutting edge technology. The resins that she uses came out of labs exploring new chemical materials to be used in aerospace and industry. Pashgian pushed the limits and stretched the boundaries of these materials – using them in ways that the scientists themselves had never conceived. Having studied the unique discoveries of the Dutch Golden Age masters in depicting light while in graduate school, Pashgian set about pioneering her own techniques to capture and explore color and light.

But perhaps it is Pashgian’s early experiences on the shores of the Pacific in California, exploring tide pools filled with strange and colorful creatures, rippling with cast light and shadow as a breeze activated their surfaces, that was the more foundational influence. Here were worlds of color and volume, light and movement. Here was something that flickered just on the edge of knowing.

The resulting sculptures of Pashgian’s explorations are small paradoxes. Somehow dense and ethereal at once. Both luminous and shadowed, merging science and art, solid and yet always changing with the shifts of ambient light and perspective. We are moved and fascinated, mystified and enlightened by turns. We are there, in the moment, experiencing wonder.

And this somehow provides the key to why Pashgian’s sculptures entrance. The writer Joseph Campbell once said, “I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”

We bend toward these pieces, eyes and brains not sure what exactly is occurring, yet knowing there is a mystery at the heart of this experience, body and emotions responding with recognition. This is Helen Pashgian’s gift to the viewer – an experience that crystalizes attention to the moment.

- Michaela Kahn, Ph.D.

Pictured: Helen Pashgian, Untitled, 2023, industrial epoxy and acrylic, 7 x 7 x 7 inches

Max Cole: Pale Horse

September 5 - 28, 2025

MAX COLE: Pale Horse

September 5 - 28, 2025

Opening Reception for the Artist: Friday, September 5th, 5 -7 PM

Gallery Talk with the Artist: Saturday, September 6th, 3 PM

The work of Max Cole feels elemental. Like the clean white bone of a deer found on a trail, a few chips of ancient mosaic uncovered buried beneath a street, or the crystalline crust of salt on the shore of a drying lake, these paintings seem composed of the essentials, of what is left behind when all noise and complication is stripped away.

Pale Horse presents a selection of Max Cole’s work from over the course of her career as an artist, with paintings from the seventies through the twenty-teens. While Cole had begun exhibiting her work earlier, it was in the early to mid-seventies that she began working with raw canvas in earnest, and as she says, “realized that I needed to stop exhibiting completely and shut myself in the studio away from all distractions so I could define my direction, which I did for about two years.” Cole emerged from this time with a direction that she has carried forward for five decades, continuing, as she puts it, her artistic “search of unknown territory.”

This new direction also led to success. A show at a gallery in Los Angeles in 1976 led to an important and formative group exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art called New Abstract Painting. From there Cole found representation in Manhattan and created a studio in New York City. During the next decades she also showed her work in Europe and even lived and had a studio there for a period. Eventually, however, she felt the pull to return to the States, and, after a few side-journeys (including a residency in Roswell, where the title piece, Pale Horse, was created), Cole returned permanently to the southwest, not far from her native Oklahoma panhandle. No matter where Cole roamed, however, her work continued to chase the spare and ascetic spiritual explorations she began all those decades before.

So this is how Cole has always worked – with essentials. Her art is pared down to the barest foundations of visual language. Her palette is primarily black and white, with shades of gray and neutral tans or raw canvas sometimes coming through. Color, with its emotional freight, has never interested her. And her canvases are spare – primarily composed of lines and minimal geometrical forms. The most characteristic element of her painting is the fine and precise making of tiny marks across her canvases, layers upon layers of razor-thin lines. In the micro view these lines are like small stitches, or even the most elemental rudiments of human language (a vertical mark, counting one). In the macro view one sees this accumulation of marks build, weave, aggregate, and flow across the canvas, forming larger tonal patterns of horizontal bands.

This restriction to such strict and minimal parameters might, in the abstract, suggest that these works will be severe, reductive, or simplistic. Instead, they illustrate the seemingly paradoxical experience of infinite expression, variety, and spaciousness that can be found within rigorous strictures. The hand-drawn, imperfect quality of Cole’s lines serve to infuse each painting with the breathing reality of the artist as present within the work. Her experience, her effort, her energy are recorded here on canvas – and there is a unique vibration and energetic quality that suffuses the work.

Black, white. Mark, canvas. Space. Light and shadow. These are the essentials of a practice of painting that has been honed over decades of careful, deliberate work. Cole’s art arises from a place of deep quiet, the patient journey of an artist toward expression that transcends the personal. If you wait, if you look, you might just catch a glimpse of those shimmering essentials that lie just on the other side of ordinary sight.

- Michaela Kahn, Ph.D.

Max Cole, Pale Horse II, 1995, acrylic on linen, 68 x 80 x 2inches, Photo: Brad Trone