12.26 is pleased to present A stranger every time, a solo exhibition featuring new works by Dallas-based artist, Keer Tanchak.

Women populate Tanchak’s pictorial spaces, harnessing the uncanny immediacy of film stills. Her female protagonists are joined by a visual lexicon that digs at, explores, and foregrounds the matrix, the lattice and the cross-hatch. This netting is a catalyst for striking, unintended beauty. Even as it introduces a degree of abstraction, it forms clusters of props and set pieces which, in turn, work in their own ways. The women are at times subsumed under floral sprays or lush patterns like wallpaper. They ask us to question: Is this a wedding veil? A curtain? Is it a hijab? Both tone and narrative escape us. Are we glimpsing a debutante or heartbreak? Tanchak avoids direct answers just as in her loose yet controlled style, she eschews likeness. She wants us to inhabit the zone of slippage.

Each woman is a flickering screen on which the viewer projects— allusive and deliberately elusive. A delicate theatricality is at work. Additionally, repetition creates an effect like a fashion runway or album, a formal vessel for both dreaming and perceived unity.

Tanchak also plays with scale and blurs the dubious boundaries between painting and drawing. To the arena of smooth aluminum as a surface, she adds paper and canvas, juggling the hierarchy of substrates, creating synergistic confusion through the medium, as well, again turning viewing into a question of point of view. Thus, while the froth of a performance has a viewer oscillate between vectors of joy and gravitas, Tanchak’s work offers the premise, or promise, that a moment can be a stranger every time and yet simultaneously a new beginning.

Keer Tanchak (b. 1977, North Vancouver, BC) received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 and a BFA with distinction from Concordia University in Montreal in 2000. She has exhibited extensively in Canada and the United States as well as in London, Switzerland, Dubai, and Mexico. Tanchak had her first solo institutional show at Dallas Contemporary entitled Soft Orbit in 2017. That same year, Tanchak was included in the Texas Biennial. Her work resides in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art. This will mark her second exhibition with 12.26.