DISTRACTION presents work by three artists created outside their normal medium, resulting in an urgency and shedding of conscious intention.
Heike Liss, an accomplished local artist more typically working in video and photography, (MFA Mills) calls her series of black and white drawings: Monadology. The works contain large, furry, charcoal drawn, dense layered forms which occupy the white space of the paper and burst forward, living a life of their own. Liss describes the forms as "primal portraits, fantasies, suppressed notions, guarded emotions, irritants, frustrations, urgencies, partners in crime," and "possible ancestors."
Huey Crowley, a young Brooklyn painter normally layers canvases with thick colorful paint in narratives around themes of the dark side of fairy tales. In "Distraction" he presents his non-precious scribbles done while watching TV between paintings. Similar narratives and tortured characters emerge with loose, slightly frantic, yet decisive line work embellished with subtractive eraser smears. The black and white drawings seem to function as breathing exercises between paintings for the artist, but arrive as evocative works that stand on their own.
Laina Terpstra, a student at Sarah Lawrence College, NY, began her painting studies investigating an abstract figurative style, using acrylics and oils with color and thick brushes. Having studied modern dance previously, she returned to studying dance at SLC. The large scale paintings presented in this exhibit came out of her new reliance on the body over traditional tools or preconceptions. She abandons brushes for scrapers and holds and drips paint, replaces acrylic color for black and white house paint, looses the figure for rhythmic sweeping shapes, except for a glimpse seen through cubist angular shapes and textures, revealing her movements.
