Correspondences - Hillvale Gallery
Jesse Boylan, Isabella Capezio, Jody Haines, Pia Johnson, Katrin Koenning, Christine McFetridge, Rebecca Najdowski, and Clare Rae are part of Correspondences, currently on view at Hillvale Gallery. The artists and their works blend - it was a breath of fresh air to have the works genuinely talk to each other, rather than yell from their own corners of a room.
Correspondences demands your time. This is not a quick, duck in duck out situation. The hanging feels like a score, works dotted on a staff as the music rises and falls. Jesse Boylan’s photogravure plates (and Isabella Capezio’s copper plate) works are stepping stones through the grass, earth and water of the show. They are a tactile, textured relief from the smoothness of the photos, and a guiding path through an exhibition that overwhelms you with emotion and movement. These works were needed moments of contrast from the glossy prints and flowing fabric. There was a tension, however intended, between the environmental focus of the exhibition and the ephemerality of the large vinyl decal works that pop up in the exhibition. Though they can be reused (sometimes), the plastic nature of them feels anathema to the ecological feminist themes of the show and its text.
Jody Haines’ portraits pose questions of haunting and memory: what are memories if not just haunting ourselves. The four images on display from Pia Johnson’s Looking for Maisie series are spiritually kin to Haines. Whereas Haines feels interior, Johnson’s work is a haunting of land, expanse, searching for a ghost in the bush: southern gothic for the southern hemisphere. Rebecca Najdowski’s Another Nature (Warm Data) flows between the spaces. Before even reading the name, I saw paper being fed into a typewriter, or perhaps being spit out of one of those dot matrix printers: a seemingly endless feed caught mid word.
This is not a show of amateur or emerging artists. Everyone here knows what they’re doing, and that confidence and cohesion shows in everything from the narrative structure to the texts. The entire body speaks its truth without relying on Kelly Hussey Smith’s exhibition text as a crux, though it is more than worth a read
Correspondences is on at Hillvale Gallery until May 31.