Hannah Rose Dumes
Jitterbug

Season Office is pleased to present Jitterbug, a new body of work by Hannah Rose Dumes. The exhibition opens Tuesday, September 8, from 6 to 8 p.m., and remains on view through October 11. Season Office is located at 4892 Grand River and is open Thursday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m.

Jitterbug brings together twenty-two small oil paintings on panel, each bearing a name drawn from popular American girls’ names in 1930—the year Dumes’s grandmother, Phyllis, was born. Dumes has long titled paintings after women and girls in her life. Alice, Barbara, Bonnie, Donna, Helen, Irene, Louise, Marilyn, Rita, Shirley, Wanda, and others arrive here as a single generation.

Across the series, Dumes builds and disrupts pictorial space through accumulated fields of color, organic shapes, drawn marks, and passages repeatedly covered, interrupted, or left visible. Forms approach recognition without settling there. Shapes suggest familiar objects or fragments of the natural world without resolving into representation. These glimpses of the recognizable establish depth only to make it uncertain again.

Color intensifies that instability. Acidic greens meet pinks, oranges press against blues, and saturated passages give way to muddier or more muted fields. Harmony is continually established and disturbed. Sweetness, abrasion, excess, and restraint coexist within the group, often within a single painting.

Paint itself repeatedly comes forward. In several works, lines applied directly from the tube sit raised above the surrounding surface: pink loops across Bonnie; darker contours move through Marilyn. Elsewhere, similar lines encircle, divide, or interrupt what lies beneath. Their physical relief makes the surface impossible to overlook. Their directness also introduces humor into a body of work rooted in the formal concerns of abstraction.

Despite their shared scale and vocabulary, the paintings do not resolve into variations on a single composition. Some are dense and crowded; others are spare. Some open toward depth, while others remain insistently frontal. The names hold them apart, asking each to be encountered as an individual without supplying a likeness.