HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce the opening of Slipstream, an exhibition by New York-based artist Bix Archer, marking her first solo presentation with the gallery.
Archer grew up in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the 2000s, immersed in the mythic figures of a Bay Area past: painter Richard Diebenkorn, whose abstract cityscapes collapsed first-person and aerial perspectives; filmmaker Barbara Hammer, whose lesbian erotic filmography used diaristic double-exposure to suggest both ephemerality and lush embodiment; and poet Robert Glück, who embraced the fabulated and confessional to capture a marginal, queer subjectivity. Despite their distinct media, these artists shared a post-structuralist lens that affirmed plurality and felt experience. As Glück wrote in a retrospective essay penned in 2000, his work aimed “to take part in a world that ceaselessly makes itself up, to 'wake up' to the world, to recognize the world, to be convinced that the world exists, to take revenge on the world for not existing.”
Extending from this cross-disciplinary lineage, Archer’s paintings stage willfully inadequate skirmishes with impermanence, transposing fragmentary and intimate methodologies from abstract painting, film, and literature to an ambivalently representational visual vocabulary. Her compositions collide gestural fleetingness and considered mark-making through self-imposed working constraints: sketching a vanishing road from the cab of her truck while her girlfriend navigates the bends of a rural two-lane black-top; capturing crepuscular studies of eaves strung with Christmas lights in night-darkened neighborhoods; returning day after day to the same site to paint quick-running creeks or effusive growths of spring foliage, which change almost as soon as they are seen. Some works continue to unfold in the studio, where they are equally inscribed by acts of invention as by observation, fiction reconciling the discontinuities across temporal and spatial rupture.
Taking up Simone Weil’s charge to prayerful attention and Sara Ahmed’s thinking around the disorientations of queer phenomenology, Archer addresses herself to the inescapable rift between mimesis and perceptual encounter. Superimposing multiple perspectives, the paintings follow the flights and fixations of her gaze, operating as imprecise measures of focus and study. Distorting color and light, she queries how other forms of sensation might enter technical chromaticism: heat, cold, isolation, desire. She tells us what it feels like to be momentarily blinded by a glint of light in sun-bronzed grasses, to melt into bed beside a beloved, to find her eyes drawn again and again from a fallen branch to look up at the sky. Tenderly, in kaleidoscopic arrays that blur and coalesce careful study with impression and illusion, Archer captures the grace of quiet moments that, despite their evanescence, we hope will last lifetimes. -- Nicole Kaack
