Feedback Loop: Linda Griggs and Allen Hansen | Project Room: Sunny Chapman: Tenebroso

Artists, studio mates, and domestic partners, Linda Griggs and Allen Hansen at first blush seem worlds apart stylistically. Griggs privileges a hard-edged realism; Hansen a numinous abstraction.   Yet, one intuits that these polarities are but contrarian shenanigans, a surrealist ruse to distract from their paired abandon into reckless romanticism.  Griggs’ seemingly unforgiving realism betrays a formalist obsession with painted color and linear design at arm’s length from the real world.  Her world is a garishly lit stage set, imagined one test shot at a time, devoid yet suggesting the unavoidable trespasses and clumsy human affairs we mistake for real life.  Hansen shares Griggs’ fetish for waking dreams and similarly toys with mood and melancholy, dark pools, and murky undertows.  If Griggs is a formalist posing as a realist, Hansen is the extreme close-up of a closeted narrative painter switching on the overhead to spy on deliciously shadowy goings-on rivaling creationist conspiracies and Hitchcock noirs. Taken together they are the perfect polar dive into the in-between space of February’s winter emptiness and its blasted flashes of fire and freeze that signal introspective epiphanies.  

Project Room: 
Sunny Chapman: Tenebroso
Chapman delves into the profound depths of darkness, both literal and metaphorical, through a series of evocative paintings. The work explores the shadows that linger on the periphery of our consciousness, inviting the viewers to confront the enigmatic beauty within the obscurity. Each piece is a dance between light and dark, revealing the hidden narratives that unfold in the twilight realm. The compositions, born from the interplay of nature and night, provoke introspection on the complexities of the human experience-navigating the mysterious recesses of emotion, memory, and the unexplored corners of the psyche.