PRESS RELEASE

Locus of control
Diane Townsend and Judah Catalan
December 4 - December 28, 2025 

Ruby/Dakota is honored to announce Locus of Control, a two-person show of works by artists and life partners, Diane Townsend and Judah Catalan. 

Press Release:

Fate knocks knees and doors. A subtle explosion, Quiet, field of iridescent lavender, a smattering of toxic pigment. Inhaled. Just enough to wake you up. The natural crook of things. A chance. Taken.

Diane Townsend has been making pastels as a way to support a life of art and love, since 1971 using a 17th century Italian formula developed by Rosabla Carriera, translated by a studio mate years later, all because she happened upon a dumpster full of pigment, on Mercer and Houston. 

In 1995, she met Judah Catalan, at an art materials exhibition at Gramercy Park Art Salon. In 2006 Diane finally lost the loft on Broome. A stint in Pennsylvania, because what choice did they have? The two have worked alongside each other since and through. Today, they live and work on opposite sides of a white wall, erected for this purpose, in their airy home in Hudson, NY. 

Through times of upheaval, we return to the medium of people. Pastels are by nature fragile. Some are softer than others, depending on their supports; clay, time, hand-formed for random distribution. A grit or pumice becomes essential for proper flow. 

If Diane's abstract, color swathed paintings are solid, sheer, impenetrable, grounded forces–perhaps her partner Judah Catalan, who shows works beside Diane, his partner of nearly 30 years— is just the opposite. If Diane's work forms a sturdy foundation, Judah’s creates a window, or many. 

Judah Catalan makes cage-like sculptures out of wire— or are they drawing in space? Or music? Connected to Calder? Dispersed air. Not a memento mori, but a sign of life, something much softer than how it appears. Rather than an enclosure, we begin to view a contorted chainlink fence as a series of openings. 

The idea of protection and being protected is a state of mind, in numbers and color, a soothing coupling, pathways are formed, one immediately becomes in conversation with the other, beyond proximity. The narrative distracts and it also roots down, weaves through. 

Both Diane’s paintings and Judah’s sculptures utilize hue and tone sneakily, making you wonder if your eyes are playing tricks on you, dancing around shaded knolls, systemic inversion of qualia, different and the same. Where there can be stark contrast between two nearly identical colors. Where perception is equal to a lie. 

These works together become a closed system. Stillness and dynamism. A world unto themselves, one which protects its own. 

And the subject of how we arrived at a place, or are beginning again. Locus of Control, a question of whether fate controlled us here, externally, internally, or eternally, a serendipitous event is just that. It’s a painting. Or a sculpture. A certain color blindness as much as she couldn’t have known what was inside that house. She entered anyway.  Blindsight phenomena, a calling for the color blue, skin-based vision. You are Here. Swaddled in a safety of knowing, both what we can see and what we can see through.

Please join us at the gallery December 4 for an Opening Reception, 6-8PM