In the 1970s. Robert Frank and his wife June Leaf began spending summers in Nova Scotia, vacating New York for more wide open spaces. Outside their house in Mabou, they hung a clothesline both for laundry and as a support for Frank’s photographs. He said that his pictures benefited from a background. The result is a force multiplier of the natural world: manufactured by humans, made visible by the possibility of a landscape.
Our two person show with painters Mary Temple and Nathan Dilworth is entitled “Double Nature,” and somehow relates to the Robert Frank story. Both are calls to behold the glory of fauna and first light.
The filmmaker Robert Bresson rightly observed that a green looks different next to a baby blue. With this metric in mind, Dilworth’s “Feeling Dream” mutates - shudders - next to Temple’s “Cibicue Falls.” The viewer is invited to contend with his abstraction as a stand-in for some Arizona waterfall and vice versa.
“A sense of things being recognizable,” says Dilworth, “but the overall logic remaining just out of reach.”
Mary Temple (b. 1957, Phoenix, Arizona) has exhibited her work internationally and throughout the United States. She has completed commissioned projects for solo and group institutional exhibitions that include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SF, CA; SculptureCenter, LIC, Queens, NY; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Rice Gallery, Houston, TX; Western Bridge, Seattle, WA; The Drawing Center, NY, NY; Bunkamura Museum, Tokyo, Japan and many others. Temple exhibits her work with Pamela Salisbury in Hudson, NY Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA, and Half Gallery in NYC.
The artist’s work is held in private, corporate and institutional collections internationally, among those are the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The GSA, Houston, TX; MTA Arts for Transit and NYC Cultural Affairs; NYC Percent for the Arts; the Fondation Francés, Senlis, France; the Salomon Foundation for Contemporary Art, Annecy, France; Bank of America, Charlotte, NC; Credit Suisse, Zürich Switzerland; Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, Boston MA; the Charles and Mary Kaplan Family Foundation, Washington, DC, and NYU Langone Medical Center, NY, NY to locate a few.
Temple is the recipient of a 2024 Surf Point Foundation residency, a 2019 MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the 2010 Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship, the 2010 Basil Alkazzi Award for Excellence in Painting, a 2010 and 2007 NYFA Fellowship in Painting, and was NYFA's Lily Auchincloss Fellow in Painting in 2007. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic and ARTNews among other publications.
She has lived and worked in NYC since 1996.