Hayley Quentin
CLOSE MY EYES TO SEE
The Bolsky Gallery
Otis College of Art and Design
9045 Lincoln Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90045
March 6 – March 10
Reception: March 9, 6-9pm
Hayley Quentin presents a solo thesis exhibition of new work in CLOSE MY EYES TO SEE.
At first glance the eye is seduced by soft, diaphanous color of what appear to be paintings. Come closer, and it’s revealed that she is using colored pencils on canvas in a technique almost, but not quite, like glazing with oil paint. She calls these “drawing-paintings” because they exist somewhere between the two. This slow, careful process allows for gradual emergence; Quentin’s drawing-paintings are continuously revealing themselves over time. Each piece emanates with a vibrational quality and a sense of infiniteness, yet somehow known. Or rather, each piece is perpetually between knowing and not knowing. Using both embodied intuition and a meticulous technical process, each work is a quiet whisper, a curled finger with a strange beauty beckoning the viewer to linger in a world of in-between-ness, balanced on an ever-sliding scale.
Quentin uses the framework of fable, and fables are often about that which cannot be fully understood or known. Through the use of repeated motifs like archways, lightning, dusk, and ellipse-framed portraiture, she spins a web of contemporary fables on longing, desire, and the myth of the mind/body split. From the initial familiarity emerges the strangeness of ideas and subjects that are unfixed in time, in technique, and in their representation. The show’s title, like each piece within, is an invitation to change one’s own perspective through a conscious pause, and a (re)connection to one’s own sensorial perception.
Hayley Quentin’s exhibition CLOSE MY EYES TO SEE opens at The Bolsky Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design with a reception on Thursday, March 9, from 6-9pm.
