May 22 - June 26, 2010

The Schomburg Gallery is pleased to present David K. Thompson’s most recent work, the “Passing Through” series of serigraphs.

View Works | About Serigraphs | About the Artist

About the Exhibition
The “Passing Through” exhibition encompasses 40 serigraphic prints from 2009 and 2010 that draw inspiration from the moment and act of “passage” – the passage of light though matter and of matter through light.

The prints that focus on the passage of light through matter explore variations on the theme of reflection – of light simultaneously passing through (backward and forward) and being obstructed by matter (such as glass or water). The challenge in many of these prints is to distill the precise act of passage – to collapse motion, perspective and depth into a completely flat plane or “moment.” Thus, rather than seeking to replicate a multiplanal visual experience through an illusion of depth and dimension, the particular goal of these prints is to compress dimensionality into a single, distilled frame of reference. The result, in principle, is an image reflecting a simultaneity of foreground, middle and background – a compressed “simultaneity of dimension” as the moment of passage.

Other prints look at “passing though” from a contrary perspective, as matter (i.e., objects) passing through light. The automobile and the freeway, of course, offer central metaphors for passage of this kind. These prints draw on the richness of serigraphic inks to explore the physicality of light itself.

To get at the essence of a “moment” of passage, almost all of the prints seek to freeze the sense of narrative movement by using a strictly square format to lock the “moment” into a single point, eliminating the inherently linear tendency of an extended horizontal structure.