In the curatorial statement for “Everyone We Know Is Here,” an exhibition of work by past Fine Arts Work Center visual arts fellows, Heidi Hahn writes about frustration, inspiration, heartache, and the endless making that typifies the experience of being a fellow during the seven-month residency.
The artwork she selected, which she describes as resonating with her personally, is marked by a lack of finish or refinement. The exhibition sticks close to the very human experience of finding one’s way as a visual artist — with all the humility, mistakes, and inspired breakthroughs it entails — and, as such, it’s a fitting celebration of a residency that has been a formative space and experience for so many.
Micha Patiniott’s painting of two flowers, Falling, perhaps best encapsulates the spirit of the exhibition. The composition is dominated by an arched blue shape that looks like a waterfall. It’s painted quickly and provisionally. Two flowers jut out horizontally from the blue form, projecting shadows but defying gravity and the painting’s sense of scale. The fragile white petals sit like delicate aberrations against the flood of blue paint. Here, grace and turmoil exist in concert; the painting becomes a place where humble gestures conjure a sort of magic.
In his other painting in the show, Fontana’s Stage, Patiniott reimagines Lucio Fontana’s earnest and self-serious gesture of slashing canvases in a playful painting of a slashed sheet blowing in the wind. The sheet and the painting itself feel breezy and ephemeral, like ghostly images about to float away.
Karen Schifano’s pair of abstract paintings similarly feel as if they’ve been caught in the dynamic act of their own creation. In Crowds and Power, a white teardrop shape falls into a stage-like space. The shape reappears in Hard Won, a painting where positive and negative space and a collection of geometric and organic shapes jostle with each other, actively and openly negotiating their relationships.
Riley Brewster, Helen O’Toole, and Tom Pappas — other abstract painters in the exhibition — make work that pays careful attention to surface. Their paintings feel like durable skins, rich with history and process. O’Toole’s small painting Cre (clay) is especially moving with its muddy surface, which darkens as the painting moves downward. It’s a primal, moody painting.
The figurative artwork in the show feels as open, improvisational, and loose as the abstract works. Bridget Mullen, Jane Corrigan, and Blake A. Daniels make ecstatic and hallucinogenic paintings where quivering, colorful environments situate figures seemingly caught in out-of-body experiences. Hahn, who has built a successful career making figurative paintings rich with pathos and humor since her time as a FAWC fellow, is represented by a small, juicy painting of a downcast figure rendered in broad, abstracted shapes.
More than depicting images of people, the figurative paintings in this show are primarily concerned with the subjectivity of emotions and the experience of living in a body. Beverly Ress’s delicate colored-pencil drawings evoke the soft tactility of bodies, whereas Sharon Horvath’s dense images merging humans and animals feel both bestial and neurotic.
The exploration of tactility is most explicit in the exhibition’s sculptures. Esther Jiskoot’s wall sculpture uses ceramic and glass to suggest flesh and fluids. Pamela Brown’s work vacillates between decoration and violence in sculptures that use spikes and steel to complicate notions of femininity.
Hahn likens this exhibition to a “sort of love letter” to a place devoted to its artists. It’s a fitting metaphor for a show that wears its emotions on its sleeve. Like a good love letter, this show is full of artists processing experiences, divulging feelings, and reveling in the messiness of their experience.
Group Exhibition
The event: ‘Everyone We Know Is Here’
The time: Through Aug. 25
The place: Hudson D. Walker Gallery at the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free
