Erin Cluley Gallery is pleased to announce The smell of rain on dust, a presentation of paintings by Jessica Vollrath. Known for her intimate portraits of motherhood and religious symbolism, Vollrath’s new paintings see the artist exploring themes of universal spirituality and surrealist composition. Her newest compositions conjure strange and alluring figures inside dreamlike settings. Imbued with a divine mystique, Vollrath’s subjects suggest themes of grief, freedom, and the will to change. The smell of rain on dust marks the Dallas-based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Vollrath creates paintings that depict figures from her personal life—including herself— and observation, often placed within mythological or historical settings. In this way, her work bears similarities to traditional history painting and figurative artists from the Black Arts Movement including Berkley L. Hendricks and Faith Ringgold. Vollrath’s recent paintings see the artist moving away from her previously defined narratives into symbolic representations of mysticism and psychological weight. These works do not so much depict history or personal narrative as imagine possible futures and emotional endurance.

In The smell of rain on dust, Vollrath experiments with the formal and conceptual conventions of figuration and narrative; her paintings consider how color, glaze, and scale affect the viewer’s perception of a subject. The subjects’ red-hued skin elevates them from the realm of simple representation, while, simultaneously, embedding them deeper into the surrealistic universe of her paintings. When I decided we didn’t have to go together (2026) and when I remembered myself at 8 (2026) feature whispering figures, turned away from the viewer and adorned in glass jewelry. Vollrath has filled the negative space with animals and plant life; their framing of the central figure resembles early 20th-century surrealists’ attempt to capture psychological principles of Gestalt, or the human brain’s tendency to organize visual fragments into a unified whole. As in her earlier paintings, Vollrath asserts the interconnected nature of humans with the natural environment and spiritual beings.

The exhibition’s title is borrowed from a 2015 book by author and trained shaman, Martín Prechtel, exploring the nature of grief and praise in American culture. Through the lens of Tzutujil Mayan shamanic tradition, Prechtel suggests a return to communal acts of grief and reckoning with loss. Though not directly addressing topics of mourning, Vollrath’s solo presentation explores the spiritual transformation of the self through painting. Like Prechtel, the artist’s enchanting spiritual guides imagine a shared mythology between the viewer and Vollrath herself. In The smell of rain on dust, her compositions invite viewers into a collective celebration of artistic discovery and metamorphosis.