Hayley Quentin – Shapeshift

June 03 – July 15, 2023

Opening: Friday, June 02, 2023 | 6 – 9 PM

LOOCK Galerie is very pleased to announce the solo show Shapeshift of Los Angeles-based painter Hayley Quentin that marks the beginning of the artist’s collaboration with the gallery.

Using both somatic awareness and a meticulous layering process, Quentin’s paintings are each a quiet whisper, a curled finger with a strange beauty, beckoning the viewer to linger in a world of in-between-ness, balanced on an ever-sliding scale. Working in soft, diaphanous layers of both watercolor and colored pencil, she intentionally blurs focus. Illusionistic image dissolves into the materiality of thick, heavy canvas in which watercolor nestles deep into the valleys and colored pencil grazes the peaks. This slow, careful process allows for gradual emergence, or a shift. It is in the incremental where one can experience perception, feeling. Each body of work exists perpetually between knowing and not knowing. Throughout her work, Quentin uses repeated motifs including lightning, archways, illuminated spiders, and ellipse-framed portraiture. These motifs reference the heavily loaded visual language of Western art-historical painting, and their meanings have, in the framework of modernity and coloniality, been reified and calcified. She actively leans towards these 'familiar' emblems precisely because they are supposedly, and categorically 'known'. Fables, on the other hand, are often about what cannot be fully understood or known. In Shapeshift, a named evocation of fable, Quentin holds the contradiction, layering this framework onto the represented motifs. In doing so, she spins a web of contemporary fables on longing, desire, and the myth of the mind/body split. Each piece is an invitation to change one’s own perspective through a conscious pause, and a (re)connection to one’s own sensorial perception.