Exhibition
in Los Angeles, CA / United States
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- © Hayley Barker
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to present “Plants, Bodies, Stars”, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles based artist Hayley Barker, on view in the Project Space.
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 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 inner 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.
Hayley Barker, b. 1973 Dallas, Oregon. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Hayley Barker makes gestural, expressive drawings and oil paintings about visionary and ecstatic experience, informed by site-specific research and her own nature-based feminist spiritual practice. Barker belongs to an inter-generational, feminist spiritual community of women (“women” being broadly inclusive). The energetic and sometimes ecstatic rituals she performs in community and on her own inform all of her creative output, as does her relationship to the history of spiritual imagery in abstract painting.
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.
This spring she will have solo shows at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles and at Carl & Sloan Contemporary, Portland.
Gallery hours Tues-Sat 10 am – 6 pm, and by appointment
Location:
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
2685 S La Cienega Boulevard
90034 Los Angeles, CA
United States
