Hayley Tompkins
Optical Research
September 10 - October 17, 2009
Content is something previously seen, thought, felt, dreamed of, which is then being re-constructed or re-imagined. I make these things to loosely enmesh myself in reality and to express positive doubt.
The painting is always a substitute.
It is made to be seen and is aware.
It has it's own built-in mechanism that measures time.
It's a form of optical research.
- Hayley Tompkins
Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present Optical Research, a solo exhibition of Hayley Tompkins' new work, which is comprised by spare wooden constructions and painted objects acting as prototypes that reference both archaic and contemporaneous life, attempting to reveal the embedded mechanistic, or ritualistic aspects of the everyday.
Hayley Tompkins has received recognition at home and abroad for her abstract compositions on paper and sculptures (or objects, as she prefers to think of them), which are at once highly distinctive and original, yet evoke feelings that can seem strangely familiar.
For her show at the gallery, ready-made objects such as out-moded mobile phones, candles, fruit peels, and spoons, are combined with paint and elements of color photographs. Tompkins thinks of the objects systematically as intervals in time and space, ultimately locating their position in-between reality and dream, obsolescence and functionality and old and new. The new works refer to a personal sense of time and matter, which are disconnected and contained.
The installation of hand-painted, technological, and autonomous-looking objects points to a wider attempt by the artist to connect with the objects in the world, finding visual resemblance with human actions such as memory recall, imagination and the effects of the passage of time.
The exhibition will also include a series of watercolors on paper, which Tompkins utilizes as objects acting like a wall, doorway, window, woven rug, mirror or lake; a Technicolor projection of another indeterminate time or event.
Hayley Tompkins has shown extensively in Europe, most recently at Inverleith House in Edinburgh, Camden Art Centre, and is represented by The Modern Institute in Glasgow, as well as Giti Nourbakhsch in Berlin. She has shown in the United States at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. This is her third show at the Andrew Kreps Gallery.