Garden

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is thrilled to announce Garden, an exhibition of new work by Jenifer Kent, on view from July 9 to August 29, 2026.

Kent’s intricate ink drawings on panel are built up through thousands of repeated marks. Radiating out from a central point, these kaleidoscopic compositions swell, whirl, explode, or oscillate with kinetic energy. Flowers, seed pods, cellular structures, woven patterns, and even topographic forms seem to emerge before giving way to abstraction as the eye travels across the surface, closing in and expanding out. Both structured and open-ended, the drawings retain a tactile, hand-drawn quality: idiosyncrasies in the line, shifts in density, and traces of improvisation reveal the physical and very human act of creation.

The drawings in Garden return to the radial movement and organic forms that have long shaped Kent’s practice, though this body of work feels softer and more open. Color also takes on a new prominence here. Blues, greens, earthy browns, and smoky purples drawn from the landscape of Northern California replace the sharper contrasts of the earlier works in black and white, with floral contours and petal-like forms appearing for the first time. Such changes are closely connected to the artist’s life in the remote Shasta Valley, where she moved with her family several years ago. Living in the high desert has brought Kent into closer contact with seasonal change and the daily practices of cultivation and care involved in tending gardens, growing flowers, and raising sheep. Over time, these experiences have entered the work itself—in the colors, forms, and rhythms of the marks. As Kent notes, she has sought to “shrink the space” between art and life.

In works such as Black Hollyhock, these connections between daily life and creative effort become especially visible. Inspired by the dark blossoms of the black hollyhocks Kent grows and uses to create natural dyes, the drawing radiates outward through repeated blue lines that give way to petal-like forms recalling both floral geometry and cellular growth. Other works, including Kestrel, Lilac, and Teasel, draw their titles from the flora and fauna of the Shasta Valley without functioning as direct representations. Instead, they convey the atmosphere and memory of place—its physical and emotional texture alike—reflecting an inner landscape shaped through years of closeness to the land, where lived experience and environment begin to mirror each other. This merging of inner and outer landscapes also informs Kent’s growing interest in gardens as spaces of refuge and resistance, an idea informed in part by her reading of Virginia Woolf, Olivia Laing, Rebecca Solnit, and Derek Jarman.


The physical act of drawing remains front and center. Each line is drawn by hand without rulers or guides, preserving the small irregularities that manifest the body’s labor and movement. She prizes these slight “wobbles” in the line, which keep the work from becoming mechanical while also creating optical vibrations of color and line. In Garden, drawing is treated not as a preparatory act, but as a complete practice in itself. These are grounding works that reward sustained attention, especially in this moment of endemic distraction. Through a poetics of repetition that evokes both devotional practices and the reassuring rhythms associated with cyclical change, they ask us to go slowly, to look closely, and to embrace beauty.

Jenifer Kent received her BFA from Rutgers University in 1994 and MFA from Mills College in 1999. She currently lives in Northern California and has exhibited at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, Montana. She illustrated Thich Nhat Hanh’s Moments of Mindfulness and has been awarded an Artist in Residence at Wildlands, Kala Art Institute, and the Lucid Arts Foundation. Her work is in the Alameda County Arts Collection as well as numerous private collections. This is her third solo exhibition at Dolby Chadwick Gallery.