Opening:
Wednesday June 18, 6-9 p.m.
Kilkenny beer with kind support of Embassy of Ireland, Sweden
Live Music: Coca Cola 3 at 7.30pm
DETROIT STOCKHOLM
Roslagsgatan 21
Stockholm
www.detroitstockholm.com/
Opening Hours:
Tuesday-Thursday 2-6pm
(Closed for Midsummer 20th June)
Detroit Stockholm is pleased to present Gods & Demons of the Forest, a solo exhibition of new work by Jane Hughes. In the exhibition, Hughes presents a series of 50 new small drawings and video works produced with material from a hunting camera which she placed in the forest for 44 consecutive days and nights in May and June during her recent residency at RUD A-I-R in Sweden.
…and your flashlight’s beam stabs jaggedly back for the overlooked face misses it overcorrects then centers on what you’d felt but had seen without seeing, just now, as you’d so carefully panned the light and looked, a face in the floor there all the time but unfelt by all others and unseen by you… (Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace, 1996)
The backdrop for Hughes’ new work is remote landscapes, depopulated areas and dense forests. She is particularly interested in the twilight hours; the space between penetrable blackness and pitch dark, when the unseen can only be felt.
She uses time lapse photography to record the ritual of day and night in the woods. The settings are carefully chosen with attention to feelings of intrigue and attraction to space during daily hikes. This photographic material is then translated into a daily practice of drawing, using black velvet paper and white pastel to create an undertone of warmth and mystery, an inviting darkness, a tension between silence and intense drama. She is trying to get closer to the hazy veil of darkness, enticing you into these intimate spaces of exploration of the expansive forest. The artist uses the technology of the infra-red camera as a tool to experiment with modes of representation, abstraction and expression, melting lines between drawing, photography and video. Hughes has always been interested in destabilizing mediums, assessing the limits and experimenting with materiality, where one can delve into mystery, loose metaphors and free associations, a possible intersection of desires and fears, gods and demons. Her drawing style is heavily influenced by the unpredictable sounds of underground experimental noise music, its poetic disavowal of rules, its emotive power for honesty, immediacy, tension and release, and most of all its embrace of chaos. Thus, she is very happy that Swedish experimental act Coca-Cola 3 will perform at the opening.
‘To enhance discourse is to paint and draw in fragment, which is an open adventure.’ ( Jo Baer, I’m no longer an abstract artist, 1983)
