Fox Hysen presents her first solo exhibition with the gallery entitled Parade, a collection of work that considers the relationship between painting, digital technology and photography. Fox is the recipient of the 2017 Tournesol Award and a painting MFA graduate of Yale University. Please join us along with Fox in celebrating the opening reception on Friday, November 2nd from 6 to 9PM.
In choosing Parade for the show title, Fox explains, "there is a dialect to parades—between order and disorder or queerness and the militaristic march...." The artist muses on public displays with underlying meaning, drawing inspiration from Impressionist landscapes. “A lot of the old pointillist painting featured circuses and people relaxing in parks, there was a kind of social realism bent to the motifs depicted. I think my work tends to read in a kind of sequence of events, one painting always influencing the next in a cause and effect kind of way."
The artist’s work addresses connections and discontinuity, both in subject and material. Considering her painting process versus printing processes, she explains that in paintings, “the dots are slow make. Very regimented. It takes days to make the stencil or some are hand painted dot by dot—a long march. On the other hand these dots constitute the marks laid down in the printing process which is about speed and reproduction. I think this work oscillates between the speed of reproduction and image making and the slowness of trying to feel material presence.”
Fox Hysen was born in northern California, she earned MFA from Yale University in 2015. She has had solo shows in New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. Fox Hysen uses the surface of the painting as a playing field for acting out narrative contradictions. A piece of newsprint or canvas pasted on seemingly haphazardly begins to behave like an image and vise versa images of artworks are reduced to scraps of paper. Through the use of collage and through the unexpected combination of materials and images she produces a diverse body of work that is both whimsical and austere.
