Continuing through April 18, 2026

In “Time and Place,” two mid-career northern California artists, Blake Asseby and Dwight Eschliman show abstract pastel drawings and conceptual photographs, respectively, that new modes of seeing and representing reality can aesthetically address the big old questions posed by Gauguin in his 1897 painting, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” 

Both artists employ a minimalist grid as a filtering overlay for their internal (Asseby) or external (Eschliman) visions. The subject and the means of its perception and replication become fused, fitting digital cultures’ interweaving of analogue reality and digital representation.

Asseby had a wandering, nomadic childhood, good training for a creative artist now synthesizing memory and forgetting, place and rootlessness, adventure and security. His abstract oil and acrylic paintings, monochromatic like drawings, marry painterly textures, spontaneously applied, with hand-carved ‘drawing,’ so that they become dialogues of improvisation and modification that cohere into mysteriously charged landscapes or, more precisely, mapscapes. The six pastel drawings in “Time and Place” are marked by a similar rich stylistic and thematic ambiguity that, in the artist’s words, “… invite[s] viewers on a journey through both physical and mental landscapes …  rhythm and pattern … [and] map the intricate stages and types of memory.” 

Two of the drawings, “Pedigree” and “Lineage” (both 2026), are done on 40 by 32 inch archival mat board, mounted on a wood panel, with the surface divided into two-inch squares, colored and textured by careful parallel strokes of oil pastel aided by a matte beeswax finish to convey with the effect of woven tapestry that must be seen to be believed. The dark forms in umber and orange that are contained and constrained by these grids recall Minimalist sculpture or painting. A third drawing, the slightly smaller ”Modern Folklore” (2025), employs the same gridded structure beneath its dark brown central cross or plus sign, framed by borders or parentheses, suggesting shadows and movement, as if the archaeological artifacts had been printed out of register or smudged.

Several other pastels, done in blues and greens, depict landscapes, untraditionally digitized or pixelated, combining modern technology with the optical analysis of Seurat and the poetic allusiveness of Klee. The titles of “A Proximate Patchwork (Desolation)” and “A Proximate Patchwork (Restoration)” (both 2026) play with the modernist conception of the paint surface as a flat wall of brush strokes, while suggesting that the oft-declared death of painting is just part of culture’s recurrent creation/destruction life cycle. Assay’s largest pastel, “The Tourist” (2026), depicts no tourist that I can discern, so it is the artist and viewers who are the tourists in time, submitting to the painting’s patient gaze. Asseby’s and our collective history is contained beneath the artworks’ prismatic surfaces.

If Asseby plays a sophisticated game of hide and seek with memory and image in his faux-textile drawings, Blake Eschliman uses contemporary photographic technology to reveal what the unaided eye cannot perceive. He examines how the digital world has changed our vision and with it our reality. The debt to art history is acknowledged, in this case Seurat’s pointillism and Rothko’s color fields, in the form of stylized horizontal bands denoting earth, sea, and sky.

Eschliman, a highly regarded commercial photographer, puts his considerable technical and aesthetic skills to work on personal projects. Previously he made, in collaboration with Anna Keville Joyce, “Pixel Food,” a small series of humorously faux-pixelated photographs of pizza, pancakes, and sushi that are composited detail shots resembling the chunky graphics from video games of a generation ago. “Time and Place” includes six works from Eschliman’s “One Day Project” that capture multiple views of the skies of northern California and other photogenic locations in Norway, Brazil, and New Zealand, recorded, one shot per second, over the set time period from one hour (3,600 second) to a full day (86,400 seconds). That adds up to 2,600 shots, or, more exhaustively, the 86,400 seconds of a 24-hour day. The shots are then composited into a single mosaic photo with the aid of powerful dedicated software and hardware. 

The one spot in the sky that Eschliman photographs in each location fields a surprising range of color, depending on location and weather. The changes in lighting intensity, hue, and saturation align into horizontal bands of slowly changing color that reference Rothko’s simplified, tremulous skyscapes. Other art-historical precedents may be seen in the sky and cloud studies by English Romantic masters John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. 

Confronting Eschliman’s six one-hour grids (60 by 60 squares) of Mill Valley, just north of “San Francisco” (2024); “Owhiro Bay, New Zealand” (2024), or “Sao Paulo, Brazil” (2023), one thinks of displays of paint chips, or sheets of stamps, while recognizing that these lyrical arrays of color, sometimes modulated into an illusion of low relief, are nature’s light shows with a certain sector of the sky caught for an hour or a day by the intrepid photographer/explorer. Eschliman’s July 2, 2025 panorama of a mountain-and-fjord landscape in “Reine, Norway” (2025) is composed of vertical strips that reveal in their light and dark banding what photographers learn early: how much the light can change in any given situation, second to second.

The drawings of Asseby and the gridded photographs of Eschliman explore perception and memory as a combination of fact and fiction, of outer and inner reality, that only art can contain and balance.