Lauren Ana茂s Hussey: Textine
Lauren Ana茂s Hussey's Textine, the artist's first solo exhibition at Tara Downs, encompasses a new body of paintings that stage moments of perceptual uncertainty, inviting viewers into a visual schema where the boundaries between representation, abstraction, and linguistic devices are placed in constant flux. Hussey's work often features trompe l'oiel renderings of metallic surfaces - stainless steel appliances, elevator interiors, and other industrial fixtures - borrowed from the more liminal spaces of everyday life. These surfaces, with their slick reflectivity and implied tactility, become sites of both beguiling attraction and visual ambiguity. They suggest a purpose the painted surface cannot fulfill. The viewer may be drawn in by their precision, only to be unsettled by the disturbances that emerge at the surface: gestural, calligraphic marks that either scratch upon or float across the picture plane, disrupting any illusion of stability or coherent space.
These overlays are not merely incidental; they operate as both formal and semantic gestures, evoking language - partial words, slivers of script, typographic reverberations - without ever becoming fully legible. They may also suggest vestigial traces of the complex process by which these paintings emerge. Working in traditional modes of calligraphy, Hussey begins each work in automatic drawing, a method of experimentation and free association, before submitting these drawings to processes of digital manipulation, deploying the final iterations as reference sketches for painting. Their mutation into painting suggests that the work unfolds across a series of translations, a series in some sense parallel to the transformations undertaken by the reflective surfaces, which transition procedurally from fleeting phenomena to digital snapshots to painted backdrops. Yet as much as these works converse with varied forms of post-digital abstraction, they also draw upon the legacies of other semiotic experiments conducted in drawing or painting, including the asemic writings of Mirtha Dermisache, the repetitious mark-making of Hanne Darboven, or the reworking of alphabetical form engendered by Chryssa.
Indeed, the exhibition title Textine itself begins to speak to these conceptual parameters. In some sense related to the preparatory drawings, although more aleatoric than automatic, Hussey generates words to produce novel or unexpected forms of signification, often by conjoining standard English prefixes and suffixes. Textine is one such word, made from the suffixes "tine" - "antler, tong, sharpened" - and "tex" - "to weave or construct." And, certainly, something like "woven sharpness" may resonate with the sensuous aspects of Hussey's work, the sense of disorientation engendered by marks that are both seemingly embodied by force and ethereal or immaterial. But, of course, the chance combination brings us back to another, perhaps closer, meaning: "of or relating to text."
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Lauren Ana茂s Hussey's Textine, the artist's first solo exhibition at Tara Downs, encompasses a new body of paintings that stage moments of perceptual uncertainty, inviting viewers into a visual schema where the boundaries between representation, abstraction, and linguistic devices are placed in constant flux. Hussey's work often features trompe l'oiel renderings of metallic surfaces - stainless steel appliances, elevator interiors, and other industrial fixtures - borrowed from the more liminal spaces of everyday life. These surfaces, with their slick reflectivity and implied tactility, become sites of both beguiling attraction and visual ambiguity. They suggest a purpose the painted surface cannot fulfill. The viewer may be drawn in by their precision, only to be unsettled by the disturbances that emerge at the surface: gestural, calligraphic marks that either scratch upon or float across the picture plane, disrupting any illusion of stability or coherent space.
These overlays are not merely incidental; they operate as both formal and semantic gestures, evoking language - partial words, slivers of script, typographic reverberations - without ever becoming fully legible. They may also suggest vestigial traces of the complex process by which these paintings emerge. Working in traditional modes of calligraphy, Hussey begins each work in automatic drawing, a method of experimentation and free association, before submitting these drawings to processes of digital manipulation, deploying the final iterations as reference sketches for painting. Their mutation into painting suggests that the work unfolds across a series of translations, a series in some sense parallel to the transformations undertaken by the reflective surfaces, which transition procedurally from fleeting phenomena to digital snapshots to painted backdrops. Yet as much as these works converse with varied forms of post-digital abstraction, they also draw upon the legacies of other semiotic experiments conducted in drawing or painting, including the asemic writings of Mirtha Dermisache, the repetitious mark-making of Hanne Darboven, or the reworking of alphabetical form engendered by Chryssa.
Indeed, the exhibition title Textine itself begins to speak to these conceptual parameters. In some sense related to the preparatory drawings, although more aleatoric than automatic, Hussey generates words to produce novel or unexpected forms of signification, often by conjoining standard English prefixes and suffixes. Textine is one such word, made from the suffixes "tine" - "antler, tong, sharpened" - and "tex" - "to weave or construct." And, certainly, something like "woven sharpness" may resonate with the sensuous aspects of Hussey's work, the sense of disorientation engendered by marks that are both seemingly embodied by force and ethereal or immaterial. But, of course, the chance combination brings us back to another, perhaps closer, meaning: "of or relating to text."
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