黑料不打烊

Mary Henderson's latest exhibition, Forces, continues the artist's hyper-real painting style that documents a particular American subculture or experience. In her previous exhibition, Right Clique, Ms. Henderson gathered inspiration from photo-sharing websites that celebrated rite-of-passage images of the elite prep-school experience. As a participant in this world, she was able to distill her commentary to a moment of realization within the context of her subjects, creating images that were captivating yet confounding. With Forces, Henderson continues to draw from personal experience through her brother, who is a Commander in the U.S. Navy and served in Iraq from February to August 2007. During his deployment, she sought information about the war by visiting public web portals where service members posted accounts and images about the war as well as their day-to-day activities. Here Henderson became fascinated with images that depicted soldiers in uniform but in non-combat settings. She wanted to zero in on moments of 鈥榙own time', moments that seemed suffused with an odd combination of boredom, bravado, and anxiety. Her hope while rendering these images as paintings was to sharpen the complexities of their emotional tone, to capture their poignancy, and create something iconic and remote. Henderson's process remains largely the same: she re-crops and refocuses images sourced from photo-sharing websites and then paints from the altered digital image. Through this transformative act of painting, the image is distilled and changed into something more archetypal: it ceases to be simply about a particular person or captured fleeting moment, and becomes instead something more public, permanent, and aesthetically pertinent.