MIRA DANCY
Mourning’s Orbit
February 21 — April 4, 2026
The paintings in Mourning's Orbit are for Mira Dancy a homecoming and a departure. They are oil landscape paintings, based on photographs Dancy has taken in the area around her home in Altadena, California, during the year since the Eaton Fire ravaged and transformed the community on every level. They are clearly different, and made differently, than the acrylic paintings of goddess-like figures that have dominated her paintings for the past 15 years. A dynamic use of line and impassioned commitment to worldly and otherworldly uses of color unifies the bodies of work, however, and suggests that the new paintings are in fact an expansion of and re-articulation of themes that give the previous ones their power.
Mourning's Orbit is a statement about the necessity of painting as both response and reflection, and speaks to the feeling of conviction—about painting, but also about art and cultural expression generally—that characterizes Dancy's work. This is a moral stance with important formal reverberations. As the show's title suggests, she is attuned to the orbits, the outer edges, of a landscape and the catastrophic changes it and its inhabitants have undergone. The paintings depict trees in every state of charred decay and abundant renewal; scorched hillsides renegotiating their subtle chaparral palettes with the forces of fire and the seasons; and sun, clouds, and luminous moods of the sky that encompasses all. Dancy allows grief and beauty to exist in close contact. They are often shown to be as intimate as two brushstrokes staking out adjacent bits of canvas, or two colors delineating the space of a tree trunk or a cloud even as they suggest extremes of ecstasy and despair.
The evocative realism of Dancy's pictures calls to mind a range of associations. They are impressionistic, expressionistic, and naturalistic, revealing not only her encyclopedic interest in the history of her medium, but the urgency with which she has tapped her own resources and lifetime of study to respond to an unprecedented moment in her own and her community's lives. The orbit of mourning, while natural and emotional, is also therefore a cultural demarcation. Forms like trees and mountains carry more than merely the images of a specific place and time; like elements of a genetic code, they are the building blocks of the foundational narratives that provide the narrative bedrock for collective human experiences.
The garden-like groves that fill the all-over surfaces of some paintings, for instance, are Edenic, with all the complexity and potential for hope and loss that the word contains. The ragged stumps that anchor compositions like the one in Resurrection, meanwhile, engage an instinct for theological speculation to which even the most casual observer might resort in the face of cataclysmic environmental change. Even absent its religious overtones, the idea of being born again becomes in these paintings a matter of daily, even mundane, reality. In the moment-to-moment negotiations with her materials; in the photographic cataloguing of scenes while on daily walks; and in the formal translation of her perception into fields of color and gesture with their own, often abstract, communicative power, Dancy devotes her attention to luminous details.
As these moments elicit her—and her viewers'—continued looking, they create bridges between what is known about this landscape and the fire and what is yet to be discovered. Like any given color—a supernatural pink, a void-inducing black, a greenish grey that evokes the need for imminent rain—such moments exist on a spectrum on which destruction and renewal are always transitional states rather than final or permanent designations. Mourning's Orbit finds Dancy locating the chapters of her artistic evolution in a similar way. In this respect, each individual painting can be seen as a question about the meaning of the past and the trajectory of the future, as well as an act of surrender to the fact that such questions can only be asked by engaging in the present moment of painting itself.
- Stuart Krimko, Altadena, 2026