JAMES RIECK + LINDA HESH + YOUNGMI ORGAN
Hamiltonian Gallery and Hamiltonian Artists are proud to announce the opening of a three person exhibition featuring James Rieck’s newest series of larger-than-life oil paintings, Linda Hesh’s photographic works documenting recent installations and products used in them, and Youngmi Organ’s delicate drawings constructed from individual strands of her own hair. Including both bold moments and subtleties, each artist presents an idiosyncratic viewpoint on our material world.
In James Rieck’s “Great Ideas for the Great-Outdoors”, Rieck muses on the commercial products that a suburban man uses to interact with nature. Continuing to use inspiration from vintage catalog photography in his work, Rieck names this series after the 1970’s Sears catalog titled “Catalog of Great Ideas for the ‘Great-Outdoors’ Season.” The largest painting, serving as the focal point of the series and sourced directly from a 2008 Nissan Pathfinder advertisement, is, rightly titled, “Pathfinder” which depicts the bottom halves of the four tires of a Nissan Pathfinder sitting atop a misty waterfall. Five accompanying paintings each present a pedestrian product that Americans bring into the natural world everyday. With their studio-lit backgrounds, Rieck captures the stark coldness that these accoutrements possess, especially when compared with the richness of our natural world.
Linda Hesh is interested in the varied human interactions and relationships she observes, often combining everyday encountered social constructs, commercial products and public locations in her work. In projects “For and Against Benches” and “Desolation Doorknob Hangers”, Hesh has common commercial products constructed, on which uncommonly found text is written, and places them in public places. The text in bold font contains words or statements emotional and controversial. How the public interacts with these objects is what Hesh captures through photography in “For and Against Benches” where benches in red and blue reading either the word “for” or “against” are placed throughout the DC metropolitan area. Hesh also will display photographs from her “Desolation Series” for which she has hung commercially printed door hangers on the doors of galleries in Chelsea, New York. The hangers which pertain to failing relationships read statements of loneliness, longing and unrest such as, “I tried to forget” and “I don’t understand you” leaving open the desperate situation these fictional characters might have found themselves in, but suggestive of the unrest of the art market in this economic climate.
The drawings of Youngmi Song Organ speak a bit more quietly about her observations on the material world. Inspired by the complexity in simple life, she too uses the common, the banal product in her work. To construct her drawings, Organ affixes many strands of her own hair to mulberry paper, creating tightly rendered representations of domestic objects such as houses, barns and benches. By using her own hair, Organ references the life cycle and sense of the history and relationships involved in it. Inspired by the world in terms of microcosms, Organ sees any tiny speck as representative of, as well as itself part of, the entire miracle of nature. Organ takes the painstakingly long process of creating these drawings as a time to reflect on contemporary life, and how life and herself are changing over time.
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