To view a painting by Jenna Lash is to participate in a push and pull of sorts, due in part to the intricate pointillist technique the artist often executes to produce her work. Following in the nineteenth-century Impressionist tradition, Lash applies individual, staccato markings in paint upon canvas that collectively blend into a coherent composition. When encountering Lash's work in a gallery or her Chelsea studio, the viewer instinctively responds to a magnetic pull towards the painting's surface, a desire to investigate the mechanics of the piece and the complex method with which it was made. After considering the artists' attention to detail, one likely gravitates backward again, moving away from the painting’s surface until the markings disappear and once again blur into a single, clear configuration. This intuitive act of being drawn toward and away from the work mimics the painting's creation as well as Lash's intent: she, too, steadily approaches and retreats from the canvas as she forms the composition, and in a broader sense, the artist lures the viewer into a conceptual consideration that is both personal and global in scale.

Brattleboro Museum & Art Center’s annual open call for artists’ submissions brought forth a plethora of exceptional responses. The effort to narrow down this comprehensive and talented group to exhibition size from more than 300 artists was a challenging yet rewarding experience.

The selected works explore the pictorial language of space and perception, balance and symmetry, and the themes of mystery and reality. I hope that they may be viewed and considered both individually and as a part of this unique collective.

Walker Roman’s and Shona Macdonald’s paintings evince a dreamlike quality, yet remain based in reality. Jenna Lash’s and Douglas Navarra’s works manipulate recognizable imagery, using source material such as currency and historic documents to examine pattern, iconography, and historical context. Roger Patrick’s bucolic landscapes appear idyllic at first glance, yet emerge peppered with unknown tensions. Ari Chaves’s nostalgic interiors alter our perspective in order to reexamine the domestic and otherwise mundane.

Jenna Lash’s works are of feeling as much as paintings of the external world, and as such breathe a fineness and sensitivity not often found in contemporary visual arts. All existence is in rhythm and rhythm transformations everything and rhythm is the underpinning and, somehow, the inside of or the germ of everything. Color is layered and often indefinite, just as human feeling cannot always be adequately delineated by an overly precise word.

The paintings present a realm within which there needs to be room for ambiguity. Almost everything in this realm is in motion: a beat generated with pattern, near repetitions, relative symmetry, and something of interchangeability.

There is in these paintings an aim for simplicity but also for multiplicity: of color, stroke, beat, meter. It is not the volumetric, mass-creating potentialities of color that Jenna seeks. Rather, as had such landscapists as Turer and Monet, she pursues the weightless, mind-held idea or feeling of color that exists in a space that, to some extent, is more akin to psychic space than to that of the solid physical world.

In an excerpt from an interview with Jenna Lash, Nalven questions, “why money?” … Lash answers, “My initial interest came from her exposure to Wall Street and the Commodities Exchange.” … She became fascinated with the impact that the trade in items such as currency and staples, gold, and soy, had on the world … As Lash examined currency of different countries she saw how it bore the nations' cultural imprint …