NEW YORK, NY.- Franklin Parrasch Gallery is presenting Ali Dipp: Unceasing Change and Everlasting Duration, the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. In this new body of work, Dipp re-presents six works from the history of landscape painting leading up to the Civil War, incorporating thread on denim to create what the artist refers to as “thread paintings.”

Commenting on her references to the Hudson Valley School, central to the show, the artist writes:

Walking under the dappling shade of maples and birches, I visited the Hudson Valley this past summer with two close friends. We arrived at the base of the switchback road leading to the estate of Frederic Edwin Church, the nineteenth-century landscape painter. Before ascending, I glanced to my left, where the matrixed orange lights of a roadside message board spelled out: “THERE IS HOPE”. Despite its utilitarian format, the phrase read in my mind as “There IS hope!” — as if recognizing something that had been there all along.

My interest in hope’s enduring power began when I first encountered Church’s “Our Banner in the Sky” beneath the scuffed laminated cover of Angela Miller’s textbook on nineteenth-century landscape painting. Church’s image, which I reference in the largest piece in this show, depicts a flag rendered in blazing cloud cover. He painted it in 1861, the year the Civil War began. The painting continues to stir perennial questions: Is it a sunrise or a sunset? Is it a moving image, because of its fragility: a sky that disappears as quickly as it forms? Do clouds best approximate the endless change that renders America so difficult to describe?

When I make my denim works in El Paso, on the southwestern border, America remains at once pictured and perpetually out of reach: a vision on the horizon where the light has yet to cast its full color. The grandeur of the Hudson can feel remote as I drive past the industrial buildings on Texas Street.

While the immensity of Thomas Cole’s “A Wild Scene” (1831-32) might feel vast because of its remove, when I re-presented the painting in my studio, I felt a certain closeness to its farthest vantage. Like Cole, I labor for the promise beyond the picture’s frame. Much like these historical figures labored, I too feel compelled to work, since hope forever implores effort. When I worked through Asher B. Durand’s bleached horizon in “The Beeches” (1845), its precipice awash with light, I recognized the painting’s distant glow. Though it depicts a place I know little about, the horizon’s flinting brightness feels familiar, because to look at the world anew is precisely what I feel when I work. Much like these historical figures labored, I too feel compelled to work, since hope forever implores effort. When I look at the nineteenth-century paintings referenced here, I don’t just see landscapes—I see paintings made to ennoble a vision, images that sought to represent a young country’s potential. What became of these paintings—and their hope—took many forms.

Despite the immense unknowns beyond reach, the splintering light reminds me of a world ablaze in its roiling brilliance: unceasing in change, everlasting in duration.

-Ali Dipp, April 2025, El Paso, TX

Ali Dipp graduated from the Brown-RISD Dual Degree Program in May 2022 with degrees from Brown University (A.B., English) and Rhode Island School of Design (B.F.A., Painting). Dipp is now pursuing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. at Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature. She is the recipient of the Royal Drawing Academy’s Dumfries Residency in Scotland. Dipp has staged her original plays though the company she co-founded in 2012, Sunhouse Arts. Sunhouse Arts donates all net profits to humanitarian efforts in the El Paso-Juárez area. During the spring and summer of 2021, Dipp co-hosted and was the creator of an iHeartRadio show broadcasted across the Southwest and Mexico, the Pass of the North Radio Show.

In 2023, the artist held her first solo show in New York, Ali Dipp: American Craft, at Franklin Parrasch Gallery. Also in 2023, Dipp curated and participated in A Particular Kind of Heaven, a contemporary group survey of the American landscape based on the Ed Ruscha painting of the same title, at parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles. Dipp’s first solo show in Los Angeles was held in 2024: Ali Dipp: Fair Fabric, at parrasch heijnen. Public collections include the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (Dallas, TX) and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (San Diego, CA). Ali Dipp is represented by Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York.