Atelier, a contemporary art gallery in Warsaw, will present the second solo exhibition of New York City painter Jon MacGregor from March 21 to May 17.
Dust Bunny Angels is a 16-piece collection of MacGregor’s atmospheric and ethereal figurative paintings of domestic life. This body of work is a rich, layered tapestry of daily tasks and moments, according to a news release from Atelier. MacGregor’s upbringing in various locations around the American South infuses his work with a Southern Gothic sensibility. His dreamlike depictions of childhood are full of wonder and simple pleasures coupled with ambiguity and foreboding. The masterfully rendered paintings are hazy and haunting reminders of our own loss of innocence.
”In Dust Bunny Angels, I conceive of the familial home as a maternal vessel and the dust bunny angels as the inhabitants of that home,” MacGregor says. “Games are played on well-worn floorboards, a child naps as another learns to read aloud. Religion taps on the window as modernity beckons outside. As daily life proceeds, the innocents gradually become aware of adult frailties and contradictions. Dust collects in the silence of the hallways and feelings are swept under the rugs. But eventually, the dust bunny angels begin to rise from the corners of their abandoned house in the form of dreams and memories.”
In this body of work, MacGregor cites painters Edward Hopper and Alex Coville as major influences; both explored the quietude and mundane in daily life. Twentieth-century Southern Gothic writers Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, and William Faulkner, as well V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited also inform the work.
In addition, cinematic influences include Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander” and Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides” for their depiction of melancholic nostalgia.
“Jon’s paintings are exquisitely beautiful and evocative renderings of everyday life,” said Atelier owner and Director Sea Grandon. “He is ever-curious about the dichotomies of life and how darkness is always a partner of light and indeed necessary to appreciate beauty and joy. In Dust Bunny Angels, we experience those childhood moments where we first grasp the existence of sadness and fear, and perhaps contradiction and hypocrisy in our parents, our peers, and the world. And yet, comfort, beauty, and love still abound.”
“For me, this show is akin to those occasions where a sunbeam streams in a window at a certain angle revealing dancing dust particles,” Grandon said. “The ray of light reveals something unseen which is always present and also transforms something we consider unseemly into something beautiful and ethereal. While Jon’s paintings are tinged in mystery and ambiguity, they are grounded in the enduring power of human connection and family.”
Jon’s first showed with Atelier in spring 2023.
MacGregor’s first solo exhibition at the gallery was a huge success. The show sold out with works going to collectors from coast to coast and a great number of paintings going to collectors in Northern Indiana. In addition, The Fort Wayne Museum of Art acquired a painting for their permanent collection. Since that show, MacGregor has gone on to show in group exhibitions at prestigious galleries in New York City and London.
Earlier this year, Grandon placed another painting by MacGregor with The Fort Wayne Museum of Art, which will be on view in the museum’s upcoming show on contemporary narrative realism called “Truthful Illusions: Realism in The Age of Abstraction.”
“It is an extraordinary honor for Jon and the gallery to have his work showing concurrently in shows at Atelier and The Fort Wayne Museum of Art this spring. I hope that art lovers in the area will take advantage of this synchronicity and see both shows,” said Grandon.
Dust Bunny Angels will open from 6 to 8:30 p.m. March 21 at 104 E. Center St., Warsaw. The show will run through May 17.
Atelier’s hours are Wednesdays and Thursdays from 1 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Fridays and Saturdays, 11a.m. to 8 p.m.