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SPECIAL PREVIEW: Sunday, April 17, 2-5 PM(RSVP)
Hayley Barker's oil on linen paintings are inspired by the joy, wonder, and wild energy that she finds in relationship with plants, bodies, and stars--shaped by her journeys in her personal spiritual practice and the physical landscape that she inhabits. In her meditative journeys beings come forth and return to the Earth. Lyrical brushstrokes convey eyes, mouths, orifices, faces, and bodies, transmuting themselves into plants or embodying stars. Ecstatic states and regal beings emerge from shallow spaces that somehow breathe.
Drawing on the art of the Symbolists and early Modernists as well as the visionary painters of the past two centuries, Barker allows her forms to unfurl with a playfulness or whimsy that manifests in the imaginative leaps she takes when transforming, for example, an aloe plant into a kind of figure that winks at you. This openness to wonder and the possibilities of the unknown (and unforeseen) is a way of creating a world in which all sentient and insentient beings, objects and spaces possess personalities.
PLANTS, BODIES, STARS takes these potent new-age themes into an intimate, feminist, contemporary context; pleasure, spiritual discernment, and the decorative meet the iconic, the painterly, and the performative in these pastel interior landscapes. Within these encounters, the possibility of radical transformation occurs affecting life in the physical, social, and political realms.
Barker received her B.A. from the University of Oregon (1996) and her M.A. and M.F.A. in Intermedia from the University of Iowa (2001). Her work has appeared in Pacific Northwest venues such as Charles Hartman Fine Art, Disjecta, and the Art Gym and in publications such as New American Painting and The Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Her work was named the best show in Portland of 2014 by Art Ltd. magazine and has been reviewed in Art in America, the Oregonian, Willamette Week, Portland Monthly and Visual Arts Source.
PLANTS, BODIES, STARS, new paintings by Los Angeles based artist HAYLEY BARKER, will be on view in the Project Space from April 23 through May 26, 2016. The show will kick-off with a special preview and reception in Gallery 2 on Sunday, April 17th, from 2 to 5 p.m. Please RSVP if you plan to attend. Her exhibition in the Project Space will run concurrent with the solo exhibitions of Kate Bonner and Margie Livingston, and an artists' reception will take place onSaturday, April 23rd, from 6 - 8 pm.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
2685 S LA CIENEGA BLVD
LOS ANGELES, CA 90034