Memory, as it turns out, does not fade with the passage of time—it instead curdles strangely, illogically, around little nuclei of sensory detail. I have not forgotten anything, you find out one day after walking into a stranger’s home and being confronted by the grief of some long-dissolved grade school humiliation. I have just stored it away.

It is not the experience of knowing, but the absurd encounter of remembering, that is evoked by New York-born artist Dylan Rose Rheingold’s work. Her paintings, made with glitter and oil paint and pastels and charcoal, focalize around talismans of domesticity. In her recent exhibition, The Blueprint, at the newly established Ward Gallery in New York City founded by Saam Niami and Gabrielle Richardson produced in partnership with Sosi Mehren, see a ballerina with a pointe shoe askew; see two figures curled on their backs against a chain link fence bathed in daisy yellow sunlight; see cartoonish hands manipulating cartoonish G-strings under half-discarded trousers, and feel the texture of the past as it forces its way into the present.

“It just felt like I was capturing a moment, or a feeling that falls under the radar or in between the cracks,” Rheingold posits of her work in The Blueprint. Rheingold, who trained at Syracuse and later the School of Visual Arts in New York, has become known for her ability to coax meaning from the interplay between subject and material. In the past two years, the artist completed a residency at The Macedonia Institute in Chatham, shown in five separate group shows, and exhibited a solo show (Shadowtalk) at T293 in Rome—but her early summer exhibition at Ward proves unique for a number of reasons: because The Blueprint was her first solo exhibition in her home city, because it was shown at a new, artist-run gallery, and because the arts she displayed were plucked from her studio, mid-process.

Rheingold engages in the practice of automatic painting, which consists of producing work “without a preconceived plan,” ideally as reflexive as breathing, eating, sleeping. Generally, this automaticity serves as the catalysis of her work—an automatic drawing session is a singular (but important) step in a long process of interpretation, after which she analyzes repetitive characters or symbols in the drawings, and replicates and elaborates these symbols to their various artistic ends. 

The Blueprint, however, proves far more intimate than other shows she’s done: on a curatorial studio visit, Ward Gallery cofounders Niami and Richardson evinced a specific vulnerability from the early iterations of her work strewn about the space. Henceforth, The Blueprint was born, the pieces far closer to her early steps of the automatic process, and, as such, closer to her own consciousness. “[The pieces] are more diaristic,” she remarks. “[To the degree that] I was a little apprehensive about showing those works and being able to talk about them.”

In his treatise on surrealism, French critic André Breton qualifies automatism as “the actual functioning of thought...the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” It is difficult, at this point in modernity, to extricate one’s consciousness, nearly entirely, from the forces from whence one came—Rheingold, who has a growing collection of her peers’ art and attends exhibitions regularly, acknowledges the sometimes irresistible pull of the outside. “[Other people’s art] becomes so attractive to me, because I’m so curious and how they’re able to pull off things in these ways. I end up wanting to jump inside their brain, because it’s operating in such a different way than mine is,” she says. “This is why, honestly, the less influences the better, at times. You’ll walk into a million shows and you’ll start creating a giant list. You don’t want to start changing what you’re doing. You need to be doing what comes natural to you.”

Rheingold does, in some ways, feel as though she lives “under a rock when it comes to most things,” she laughs. “My boyfriend was talking about a podcast discussing men and their downfall of confidence with dating and careers…He was asking me questions about how women feel about [things]. I realized that I don’t know if I’m the best person to answer questions about what the average person thinks,” she muses.

This line of thinking tracks for an artist whose body of work draws on the imagemaking of the outsider: to be young is to be an outsider (see “Transparency,” a woman cut off at the hips as if viewed from the perspective of a small child); to be a woman, especially a woman of heterogeneous cultural background, is to observe, and to be observed, from the outside (Case and point, “Reflections from the Dollhouse,” while the figures in the Dollhouse observe buoyant cheerleaders, hurling themselves to the sky in the foreground, while the audience observes it all). 

Rheingold attributes this ongoing interest in the private/public dynamic to a collage of family photos she compiled during the pandemic—the “guiding light” of her practice. The piece involved her parsing through old family photos, pairing her mother’s archival images (pictures of half-Japanese children taken on farms in rural Massachusetts, surrounded by white people) with her father’s family photos (“classic, old-school Brooklyn Jewish [family]”). The familial nature of the work, she clarifies, didn’t necessarily spark her inspiration (“Candidly, I don’t know a lot of the people who I’m cutting around and playing with,” she laughs), but it was the act of parity that brought her to her work as it stands now. “I realized that what I was enjoying, or searching for within,” she admits, “was really this whole idea of otherness; configuring things in ways that didn’t feel like they fit.” 

Despite a process conducted in varying forms of psychosocial isolation, there is a universality intrinsic to Rheingold’s ouvre—her works, she admits, can come off both “innocent and nostalgic,” as well as “unintentionally voyeuristic.” She attributes both of these, in part, to the working within the framework of adolescence as an economic concept. “I’ve done a lot of research into the advent of [teenagerdom],” she tells me. “It was really just a byproduct of capitalism and having wages lifted so you could start working. With that came these pop consumer goods, and the boom of the teenager.” For the vast majority of the audience, memory is inextricable from consumption. By focalizing objects— a neat line of pink shoes, a clothesline of underwear, stuffed animal bunnies and farm animals with bows on their tails, Rheingold curates an atmosphere of recollection, harkened by mnemonic totems of knowing, signposts of reality awash in a slurry past.

Rheingold’s work toggles between modes of isolation and observance; between periods of deliberate unconsciousness and vast stretches of hapless clarity. In The Blueprint, Rheingold draws us, the audience, into her id, as if she’s tucking her head into the crooks of our necks, murmuring a private, shared joke passed between grade school confidantes: This is what I recall. Do you remember it this way too?