DOPA MINE
DAVID KAISER + SUBSTUDIO
(February 15—May 3, 2025)
ABOUT |||||||
This exhibition brings together paintings by David Kaiser and recent wall hangings by SUBSTUDIO (Hannah Dewhirst and Ingrid A Schmidt). Utilizing different mediums and approaches to making, these artists are aligned in their rigorous commitment to abstraction and experimentation. Transforming their chosen materials through additive or subtractive gestures, they create works that have a call and response relationship to each other, and share formal concerns including shape, line, color, and repetition.
Kaiser uses his Lexington studio to make abstractions that are the result of manipulating paint over time—dripping, layering, carving, and constructing. His finished paintings feature organic shapes and lush grounds, combining aspects of drawing and printmaking, plan and serendipity. In some works, color emanates from below the surface through deep grooves the artist cuts into dried acrylic slabs. Others feature thick chunks of paint, resembling fragments of rock, embedded on top of the canvas like geological samples. With his inventive approach to composition and mark-making, Kaiser demonstrates the elasticity of what "painting" can be.
Schmidt and Dewhirst are co-founders of SUBSTUDIO, a Lexington-based collaborative design and research practice that utilizes hand-made processes along with digital fabrication, robotics, and factory production. Their tufted textiles attest to the wildly expressive potential of fiber: elaborate patterns emerge from the carefully "sculpted" wool pile, and calibrated shifts in color and texture work together to enhance the sense of dimensionality. Engaging the formal qualities of their materials, SUBSTUDIO offers viewers a seductively tactile experience of optical overload.
The title of the exhibition is a play on the word "Dopamine," a neurotransmitter in the brain that acts as a messenger between nerve cells and the rest of the body. It plays a role in memory, attention, motivation, and mood; and is known as the “feel good” hormone. For our purposes, the broken word connects to notions of experimentation, cognition, and visual pleasure.
ARTIST BIOS |||||||
Ingrid A Schmidt and Hannah Dewhirst are co-founders of SUBSTUDIO. With a background in architecture, interiors, contemporary art, and fabrication, they build immersive sensorial environments that relate to the body, landscape, and culture. Schmidt and Dewhirst firmly believe in dissolving traditional boundaries of practice, experimenting across a number disciplines and at many scales.
Both Schmidt and Dewhirst are Assistant Professors at the University of Kentucky College of Design, and received their M.Arch degrees from Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Their work has been exhibited across Europe and Asia, and their custom textiles and tufted rugs have activated retail spaces and festival stages, and have been used in immersive environments for clients including fashion brands Bottega Veneta and Burberry. They were recently commissioned to create a site-specific installation for 21c Museum and Hotel, Lexington, which is on view through 2025.
David Kaiser holds an MFA and BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago specializing in painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. He uses the term “Organic Ideation” to describe his approach to creating artworks. His artistic practice is grounded in painting and drawing. He often manipulates the natural behavior of paint and other materials to seek phenomena and concepts, which transcend the material itself.
Kaiser is the Assistant Dean for Student Affairs and a Studio Instructor at the University of Kentucky. He has taught at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, Maryland Institute College of Art, Robert Morris University, and Eastern Kentucky University.
His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at the University of Kentucky Art Museum (Lexington KY); 65Grand Gallery (Chicago, IL); Eastern Kentucky University (Richmond, KY); Sullivan Gallery (Chicago, IL); Harold Washington College (Chicago, IL); Lawton Gallery, University of Wisconsin (Green Bay, WI); SPACES (Cleveland, OH); Site 9 (Chicago, IL); Beacon Street Gallery (Chicago, IL); Diverse Works (Houston, TX); Evanston Arts Center (Evanston, IL), among others.
