RAINRAIN is pleased to present During an Eternity, the first solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Jameson Magrogan. In Magrogan’s practice, the durational process of painting glitches into multiple, overlapping temporalities. Magrogan does not paint in any traditional sense of the term; he sculpts, manipulating paint as if it were clay. Using various implements such as metal plates, paint is compressed into, not onto, the cratered divots of the warp and weft of the canvas. Peeling away allows the paint to pucker into tectonic ridges. In other places, paint is pushed through the pores of perforated vinyl, leaving behind a dotted netting framed in angular planes. Within their sharp rectangular limits, the dots mimic the shape and weave of canvas left bare.
Drying time stretches into indeterminate spells of waiting. When, later, Magrogan returns to the construction, it is to sand paint down, grind it in, scrape it off. In time, the surface is built back up, perhaps with a palette knife, perhaps with a transparent pour. The composition of the work takes shape in these imbricated temporalities. Segmented gestures bring the composition slowly into existence.
Occasionally, a brushstroke darts across a portion of canvas. But Magrogan clamps down his own hand; the organic mark disappears into a language of outlines, ridges, wefts. These new peaks and valleys unfold topographically, forming a unique sediment over the canvas’s surface. Forms slip behind edges, or burst through their netting. Shapes tumble into recesses, or emerge energetically from underneath stratified grooves. Outlines both contain and dissolve.
In relation to these works, the viewer finds himself in flux. He approaches the canvas to discover that objects have lost their solidity. From this vantage, precision abuts disarray. The viewer retreats; forms falter and swell, and a gravitational pull appears, threatening to lure the composition into a looming void. When the viewer approaches once again, the vacuum dissipates. Opaque forms are revealed as translucent lattices; ridges snake out in patterns of biomorphic veins.
The painter, too, is in flux. His hand retreats behind contour lines and bespeckled webs. He is nowhere, but his calculus is hyper-prevalent. He commands attention, only to prove that he is not there. The paintings function according to their own internal logic, a logic that does not permit unmediated marks. Magrogan thus operates in a paradox of a restraint both excessive and measured.
In Magrogan’s work, what is at stake is not simply alienation, an effect perhaps too easily gestured at in abstract painting. Rather, the effect is one of disorientation—spatial, temporal, even phenomenological disorientation. Though the paintings are self-consciously topographical, it is not a territory that Magrogan maps.
Rather, he delineates an atmosphere, one in which time is subject to glitching, overlapping, and fragmentation. The paintings of During an Eternity operate at the threshold where figure and ground trade places, and where surface becomes depth. In this unstable reciprocity, appearance no longer guarantees what is; instead, viewers encounter a system that both reveals and conceals itself in the act of looking. Magrogan’s practice thus disrupts logical presuppositions, undermining the algorithmic reduction of phenomena into quantifiable data.
Text by Shoshi Rosen
Jameson Magrogan (b. 1992, Baltimore, MD) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Through both digital and analog interruptions, his work creates spatial and temporal ambiguities that resist efficient reducibility and unsettle painterly conventions. What first appears as a stable image or chronology gradually reveals a more unstable frequency over time. Magrogan received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2014 and his MFA from Hunter College in 2021. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York and Berlin.
