Opening Reception - Jane Helslander: Field Presence

Getting inside a Jane Helslander painting is an experience that transcends such academic parameters as perspective and transparency. Helslander's surfaces may be planar, her mediums opaque, and her compositions unrelated to perspective, yet her paintings almost drag one into them and compel one to dance with them. The overriding impression is that one is being involved, surrounded, and moved.

Helslander's inspiration is the ceaseless drift and flux of nature in all its forms. She spends a great deal of time quietly observing phenomena that range from the ripples in a pool of water to the near-immobility of rock formations; from snowstorms, swirling in the light of street lamps, to the calm of distant horizons. Her art gets deeply into the clockwork of nature's organic machinery; it is concerned with the chemical strings that make up all matter, and it tracks the random patterns that keep the world in constant motion. It amplifies the organ-grinder tunes of daily existence, and it picks up the faintest whisper of life at a cellular level.