At Entrance, Zachary Armstrong Dissolves Memory into Space

Midwest Art Review

At Entrance, Zachary Armstrong dissolves memory into space

Midwest Art Review takes a trip to see the Dayton, Ohio-based artist in New York, where a fragmented childhood drawing is distilled into a whole field of reality.

By Hannah Kasper | May 27, 2026

Entrance occupies a narrow Lower East Side building at 48 Ludlow Street, constructed in 1900 and surviving from the neighborhood’s history as a crowded immigrant district.

My ancestors worked in sweatshops and lived in tenements not far from here.

Because it was one of the earliest settled areas of Manhattan, the Lower East Side’s layout is a patchwork. I’ve always had an affinity for these streets that don’t fit the Manhattan grid.

The gallery, comprising basement and street level spaces, has existed in one form or another in this location since 2009. Its modest footprint and approachable owner, Louis Shannon, feel refreshing given a serious art historical lineage.

Lately I’ve been absorbed in the writings of Philip Guston, whose thinking feels relevant to Zachary Armstrong’s solo show at Entrance, up through June 13.

“The most powerful instinct is to paint a single form in its continuity,” Guston said, speaking of figuration.

But when Guston tried to work this way, when he reduced an image to a can with paintbrushes, he couldn’t stand the way the form became symbol.

“I see where I started with certain things — you might say objects — and then they became dissolved and then somehow the whole field becomes the reality.”

So it is with Armstrong, whose fragmented encaustic lines dissolve into a total field of relation.

For years Armstrong — who lives and works in Dayton, Ohio with thriving New York and international representation — has reworked a drawing his older brother Noah made of him as a baby.

Using a distilled grid to organize the “manipulation and repetition” of that source material, he builds heavily layered encaustic paintings that both preserve and deconstruct the image.

More than an installation, Armstrong creates a total environment. He’s done this with his wallpaper-and-painting combos at The Contemporary Dayton and The Wexner Center, and with “Encaustic House” at Faurschou Beijing, which will soon come to The Weston Gallery in Cincinnati.

“I wanted to blend the paintings with the walls, so there was no beginning or end,” Armstrong said of his 2021 installation, “Grids & Abstracts”, at The Contemporary Dayton.

“All ‘in-between’, you know? All interstitial. No focal point.”

Guston took issue with the traditional picture plane taught in art schools.

“A lot of painting thinks of the square or rectangle as a kind of hole which you just pour stuff in, and make it look real. The forms don’t give promise of any continuity. My only interest in painting is on this metaphysical plane where the condition exists of no finish, no end, but infinite continuity,” he said.

On his favorite paintings, the frescoes of Piero de la Francesca, Guston said, “The picture plane doesn’t exist factually. It’s totally an imaginary place which has to be created by illusions.”

Things are not as they first appear in Armstrong’s exhibit. Called “Entrance”, it is an appropriately self referential title.

The segmented panels resemble jigsaw pieces, fragments of a larger architecture, notched into fabricated wainscoting. Though modest individually, together the installation reads as one immense painting dispersed across the room. The spaces behind the works become as significant as the encaustic surfaces themselves, the gaps creating rhythm.

You find yourself wanting to move behind the frames, to trace the seams where painting, wall, and architecture collapse into one another.

This negative space activates the wall almost sculpturally. Or perhaps more accurately, like a painting that exists out of dimension. You find yourself wanting to move behind the frames, to trace the seams where painting, wall, and architecture collapse into one another. The wall tiles, which are actually precisely measured encaustic paintings with fake-out grout lines, are so texturally sensual that you can’t help but touch them.

Armstrong balances this instability between surfaces carefully. The work is clever without becoming gimmicky. Its conceptual rigor remains grounded in an intensely embodied material presence.

Across Armstrong’s practice, there is a consistency of material language, whether he’s depicting a rooster, a house, a grid, or a heavily abstracted line. The imagery may dissipate nearly to the point of disappearance, but the tactile reality remains insistent.

The artist sources roughly 2,000 pounds of beeswax annually from a local Ohio farm. That relationship to local industry feels important. His studio, located in East Dayton, occupies a former sewing machine manufacturing facility — a structure tied to Midwestern industrial history.

Labor quietly reverberates throughout the exhibition. The grid of the tiles, meant to reference the ubiquitous orange glazed floors of commercial kitchens in the Lower East Side and Chinatown, recalls the precision of a technical drawing while resisting mechanical exactness through the evidence of the hand.

The setting intensifies these associations. Housed within a century-old building shaped by immigration and economic survival, the gallery becomes a participant. Armstrong’s fragmented forms feel unexpectedly at home, as though the paintings are absorbing the memory embedded in the architecture itself.

Downstairs, the inclusion of work by Armstrong’s son, Jackson Maximo Armstrong, adds another layer of familial resonance to the show. The presence of another generation expands the exhibition into something broader — a conversation about memory, inheritance, and making.

The younger Armstrong incorporates his love of textiles in his screen printed panels. Over 70 small works create a continuous line across the lower level gallery, individual improvised decisions building into a single extended field. The lace-like textures are built up in layers of color shifts, like CMYK color bars printed slightly off register.

Both father and son have constructed environments where fragments combine to form a whole.