People thrive on familiarity and will go to great lengths to find it in the unknown. Giving personas to clusters of stars, anthropomorphizing rocky outcroppings, or even imagining figures in the dark, the human mind will search inexorably for recognizable shapes in a sea of abstraction. Like peering through a gauzy veil, Jenna Ransom’s paintings appear to coalesce into natural shapes like eyes, beaks, or claws even as they morph into alien flora and pure color before our eyes. Evocative of Odilon Redon’s atmospheric symbolism, the dappled light of Monet’s Water Lilies, or even the soft focus of 80s fantasy films, they establish a discrete visual language that is perplexingly both knowable and unfamiliar.

Ransom’s oil on canvas paintings are meticulously crafted by building up multiple layers of thin paint - adding with brush and subtracting with cloth - until a deep but ethereal sense of atmospheric space is created. In mood and palette, these are landscapes, but they eschew the traditional deep perspective of the genre and instead exist in a paradoxically frontal mode. The misty layers confront the viewer immediately as if walking through a haze. At times they resemble an aerial view through the fog while at others the strata of her process become more evident.

Complementary to her paintings but by no means smaller versions or studies, Ransom’s works on paper expand on her elusive imagery through a similar mode of automatic drawing. Starting in the corner, consecutive marks are butted against each other in stacked rows. They act as a visual tally of the work involved in their creation. Allowing the marks to evolve on their own, lines become symbols, and symbols become dense treatises in an unknown language. Fungus shelves, insects, and floral shapes flit about the page surrounded by densely worked shades of gray. Their graphic quality is immediate and striking, but this visual clarity is stymied by the way any knowable meaning disappears the longer you look.

In dreams, when one looks directly at the subject, details often fuse and disappear making them hard to remember upon waking. Looking straight at the stars on a clear night, the celestial bodies appear fuzzy as they jitter in sight, but looking in the periphery they suddenly become clear as our eyes’ rod cells function better in the dark. Out of the corner of your vision, Ransom’s works appear familiar and appeal to the viewer’s instincts. A flower, an insect, and a bit of script, all exist within Ransom’s frame until they are confronted fully. Illusory and enthralling, each work evokes our curiosity and keeps us coming back for more.

Press release and images via My Pet Ram.