JOSEPHINE HALVORSON, LESLIE HEWITT,
JENNIE C. JONES
December 10, 2015 – January 23, 2016
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present a group exhibition of work by three gallery artists, Josephine Halvorson, Leslie Hewitt, and Jennie C. Jones, on view from December 10, 2015 through January 23, 2016.
Josephine Halvorson makes paintings on-site and in real time, transcribing duration, environment and her own perceptions through the medium of paint. Looking hard at the world around her, latent histories are expressed and new understandings of the everyday emerge. Her most recent body of work, created while a pensionnaire at the Académie de France in Rome, marks the first time the artist has worked serially. Each painting, made over the course of one night, is a distinct, extended and intimate engagement with one window that looks onto the grounds of the Villa Medici and the city beyond. Exhibiting several of these works at once, she dislodges the window from its actual location and time, making public an otherwise private view and conflating present with past.
Leslie Hewitt uses the language of photography to examine temporality, the complexity and strength of memory, and how we experience or interpret lapses in historical narratives. The Still Life series reads as both photograph and sculptural intervention—the artwork is positioned leaning on the wall, changing the way we perceive and physically encounter the image. In each photograph there is a constant yet subtle refrain, provided by James Baldwin's seminal 1963 book, The Fire Next Time. This historically dynamic text is placed within and quietly disrupts Hewitt's modernization of a 17th century still-life composition—referenced most cunningly in the inclusion of the traditional symbolic citrus fruit, a perfectly sliced lemon—as well as found photographs, books, and maple wood board.
Jennie C. Jones' work exposes the connections between conceptual and avant-garde African American music, and the cultural, political, and historical ideas surrounding Minimalism and Abstraction. Her "acoustic paintings" constructed from industrial sound absorbing panels suggest both the aural and physical dynamics of listening, while formally hearkening the geometry of music notation—in particular that of the “bar line” found at the end of a measure. In this exhibition two collage works are titled after Blues songs, easing the viewer into a sensorial experience of perhaps recalling and internally "hearing" a tune that is stimulated by a visual experience. The new paintings on view investigate "the gesture of sound", exploring forms of improvisation within expressionist painting, juxtaposed against the stillness andcontainment of the acoustic panels. Her restrained palette of gray functions as a rich cultural metaphor, a color residing between the binary. Gray space as a ‘rest’, ‘break’ or moment of hush.
Josephine Halvorson recently returned from a year long residency at the French Academy at the Villa Medici in Rome, the first American to be awarded the prize. She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union (2003) and a MFA from Columbia University (2007). Her first solo museum exhibition, Slow Burn, was on view at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, during spring 2015. A catalogue published by SECCA accompanied the exhibition. Several of her paintings are also on view in the exhibition Intimacy in Discourse: Reasonable-Sized Paintings, curated by Phong Bui at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. Outlooks: Josephine Halvorson, a project at Storm King Art Center, will open in May 2016. Halvorson is a Senior Critic in Painting at the Yale School of Art.
Leslie Hewitt graduated from The Cooper Union's School of Art in 2000 and went on to earn an MFA from Yale University in 2004. Her work is currently on view in the exhibition Time/Image at the Blaffer Museum at the University of Houston through December 12. The exhibition will then travel to the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Spring of 2016. Hewitt’s work will also be on view in the exhibition Photo-Poetics: An Anthology at The Guggenheim Museum in New York from November 20, 2015 through March 23, 2016.
Jennie C. Jones attended Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts where she received her Masters of Fine Art degree in 1996. Prior to that she attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving a Bachelors of Fine Art in 1991, with Fellowship. A ten-year survey exhibition of her work, Compilation, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, will be on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston from December 12, 2015 through March 27, 2016. A book published by Gregory R. Miller will accompany the exhibition.