Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Seattle-based painter Jaq Chartier's SunTests. This new series of dye sublimation prints on aluminum are time-based "image captures" of the artist's ongoing explorations of material phenomena. Chartier's unique process-based practice shares a visual language with Color Field painting and combines her fascination with materiality, time, and conditions. Inspired by DNA gel electrophoresis (a technique for separation and analysis of macromolecules and their fragments), her work is about discovery and pairs scientific investigations with conceptual themes of impermanence.
The SunTests series records the mutability and transformation of intensely brilliant, jewel-toned colors created from fugitive dyes, inks, and stains that change over time when exposed to sunlight. The experimental processes continue in the paintings in Chartier's studio, while the prints on view in the gallery offer glimpses into suspended moments of their metamorphosis.
Multiple groupings selected by the artist allow viewers to witness the evolution of colors and shapes in visibly distinctive phases of change. Lively structured rows of blurred, animated abstractions in the triptych, SunTest #3 (Day 1, 12, 35) continually delight with unexpected color shifts, each one infused with the poetic vulnerability of their evanescence.
