art Collaboration tends to attract a lot of puzzled-sounding critical ink—who made which part, whether the match is fruitful—but when artists with compatible interests work together, the work speaks for itself. Divisions of authorship, real estate-style, are not really the point, as Dean Dass and Clay Witt’s show beautifully illustrates. Each artist contributes a body of work with its own obsessions and techniques, and in several collaborative pieces these strains effortlessly merge.
Both are working with complex, multi-stage printing techniques (including inkjet and intaglio) that speak deeply of time and result in objects more precious than the gold leaf and lapis lazuli that bedeck them. Dass’ delicate compositions often recall display cases in a natural history museum; for example, “Shield” uses a ground of hand-stitched linen, like a cleaned-up fragment of mummy wrapping, on which shards of mica and bits of gouache on paper form careful rows. Witt returns to central, circular forms; whether celestial or cellular (the lonely, waiting ovum), they function as ancient and elemental icons of nature.
The alchemy of the artists’ processes—intensive and mysterious—makes for endless particulars: the fractal complexity of the surfaces, the nearly geologic layers that reach off the page and beyond the mechanically reproducible status of two-dimensional photos or prints. The works are almost sculptural in their response to materiality. Whereas Dass’ work suggests human arrangement within nature’s enormity, Witt’s revolves around the abstract as it decays into something specifically, physically present before the viewer.
It’s no less alchemical when the two artists work together. New forms emerge: the meandering gold thread in “The Eighth Day,” for example. And these different approaches to the world’s abundance of natural forms seem to agree with one another on a molecular level.