Jenny Brillhart: Housekeeping

For her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, Jenny Brillhart presents painted set-ups that she arranges and re-arranges in her studio. These paintings relay with haunting harmony and similitude the light and quality of her practice space. Brillhart comes to her routines with a set of principles: no object is more important than another; the building, its light and space are as much materials as any other, including the paint. The objects are often ready and within reach.

Laid over these principles, heightened awareness over the last year of moving houses, keeping house and watching her children become their own people, fundamentally unknowable even in times of forced closeness. Her actions, movements and disturbances within her studio space are similar to those repetitive processes of cooking, cleaning, arranging, and neatening up. Still, she feels more free amongst her autonomous objects. In the studio the materials and the artist are freed from function. Objects coalesce into arrangements, as if in a dance.

Brillhart explains that the found materials effect and can direct the way she paints. Her studio objects, light and time open new paths of decision making. Said in another way, the setting up, arranging and making things just so has made her sensitive to the situations the objects need. There is indeed an absurdity to making a careful arrangement of often discarded things, like insulation or leftover drywall, and then dutifully paint these set-ups. This absurdity is a comment on the chaos that lies just beneath, and the lengths and efforts made to feel a sense of control and order.

Acknowledgments: Francesco Casale, Sinisa Kucek, Mac’s Framing, and Fulano Inc.