In a two-person exhibition at Work Gallery, Hannah Barnes and Kristine Taylor present new work that explores ideas of longing, desire, and the profound urge to ‘make-visible’. Working across painting, drawing, collage, and temporary structures, Barnes and Taylor tease out the liminal space where painting, drawing and sculpture overlap. Their work combines visual elements culled from urban and suburban landscapes, from sites of spectacle such as sporting event and carnival, and from the rich history of modernist abstraction. At the core of each artist’s working method is a commitment to painterly process, a desire for work to arrive as much through intuition as through intention, and a strong sensitivity for the inherent poetics of materials. In each of their work, image, form, and substance work together as an emotionally charged system of material, sign, and trace with its own specific and untranslatable kind of meaning.

In her new work, Taylor walks the line between “finding” and “planning” a painting. In her own words, “sexy peaks, crevasses, and overlappings accrue to form visceral chemistry. When these instances of heated abandon leak into cooler systems of geometric painting, the result is a psychological dance between stasis and movement, nightmare and sunshine.”

Barnes’ recent work uses forms culled from memory, urban and suburban landscapes, and specific personal experiences to craft paintings and drawings that are, as Barnes’ put it “objects with lives, accumulations of being and becoming.” Barnes’ most recent work takes as its subject experiences of geographic displacement and examines the sense of loss, disorientation, and fragmentation of personal identity that arises as a result. In Barnes’ paintings everywhere is nowhere, and nowhere is everywhere.

After completing their MFA degrees at Rutgers in 2006, Taylor and Barnes have continued an ongoing dialogue concerning problems of making and thinking about abstraction, as encountered in their respective studio practices. This exhibition presents an opportunity for the artists to examine intersections and departures in their ideas about abstraction and to invite new questions to surface.