ELLEN HERSEY:
HEAVY BODIES TO FALL TO THE EARTH
Jason McCoy Gallery is pleased to present a special presentation of work by Ellen Hersey.
Ellen Hersey’s practice explores the interrelationship between painting and photography as modes that blur, overlap and mirror each other. Pulling imagery from an indiscriminate range of sources that widely feature landscape, textures and bodily elements, she experiments with reproduction until the images begin to dissolve but her processing of them remains. Expanses of color and deletions allow motifs to rise to the surface only to sink again, while interruptions in the surfaces cause abrupt shifts in realities.
Ellen Hersey, The Road, 2019, Monotype on BFK Rives 280 gsm, 30 × 44 in (76.2 × 111.8 cm)
ELLEN HERSEY: HEAVY BODIES TO FALL TO THE EARTH
March 21st - May 31st, 2021
Ellen Hersey, Untitled (Cloud), 2019, Oil and collage on mylar, 24 x 36 inches
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Does it matter to the tree if we are there or not? It’s easier to say that it matters to us, when we perceive the falling tree an impression is made on our senses that ripples through us as observers, it filters through our minds and our bodies, turning into memory.
In the contemporary westernized world where daily experience is mediated through photography, we don’t only view the tree, we frame and capture it, we look at pictures. Products of culture, we process a proliferation of ideas, a world available in palatable slices and streams of information.
Ellen Hersey, Decomposition, 2017, Gouache, collage and newsprint on mylar, 60 x 42 inches
As in the context of awakening Adrienne Rich wrote, 'Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.' Using photographs is akin to putting my hand into the endless cascade of perspectives. The hand, informed by bodily experience, reaches in to grab, tracing likenesses in a way of becoming.
I work largely with reproduction, cycling images through varying printing methods and recreation of pictorial elements and veiling them with films of color. By moving back and forth between painting, photography, printmaking and collage I create a process of mirrored displacement where iterations reflect and refract each other.
Left: Ellen Hersey, Tremors, 2018, Diptych, Monotype on BFK Rives 280 gsm, Each: Paper: 24 1/2 x 39 inches, Image: 19 1/2 x 341/2 inches
Right: Untitled (Violette), 2017, Silkscreen on acetate, 21 6/8 x 26 inches
The photographic material presents a record of surface, inscriptions of light impressions from the physical world. It comes to me as a frozen moment that I combine with fluid passages and movement in paint. I soak images so they dissolve or absorb while the paint washes, corrodes and recedes. I lay out large expanses of pigment, which collide with each other in order to cause abrupt shifts and to break down existing forms and structures.
Part of the challenge is to evolve the images - of bodies, terrains, manmade and natural elements - to express their transformation and frustrate a singular view or story. The photograph is a vehicle fueled by energies of imagination and intuition that propel it from its single point reality into a new psychic geography."
-Ellen Hersey, 2021
Ellen Hersey, The Center Can Hold (2), 2020, Inkjet prints on 90 gsm paper, Image: 23 x 32 5/8 inches Sheet: 23 1/2 x 33 inches
"If men ceased to exist sound would continue to travel and heavy bodies to fall to the earth in exactly the same way, though ex-hypothesi there would be no-one to know it" - Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 1975
Born in northwest London, Ellen Hersey received an MSc in Gender, Media and Culture from the London School of Economics and Political Science before completing her BFA as an Illustration major at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has participated in exhibitions in New York, London and in Greece.
For further information, please contact amanda@jasonmccoyinc.com.