January 3 – January 28, 2024
450 Harrison Avenue #29, Boston, MA
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery | Boston is proud to present Should I Warn the Others, a two-person exhibition featuring the artworks of Janet Loren Hill and Alex McClay. The artists explore themes of bodily autonomy, boundaries, and how communication can both facilitate connection as well as sow discord. Boundaries protect us, but they are also sites of violation. Janet Loren Hill has three series on display: her signature Binocular Viewpoint paintings, ceramic Chattering Teeth objects, and Standard Bearers. Hill’s work exists at the intersection of textiles and painting, along with brand new ceramic works. Alex McClay uses emergency blankets, survey tape, beads, and silk thread to weave together messages alluding to traumatic experiences as a means of offering connection through shared vulnerability. The tactile nature of the artworks suggests the physical weight of an object, and how people and things take up space. The exhibition addresses a distant past and a difficult present through a range of distorted viewpoints, both literal and symbolic.
In her Binocular Viewpoint paintings, Janet Loren Hill combines textiles and painting to create surrealist characters who play out propaganda techniques and warped ideologies, both historic and present day. The main characters in the works on view are the Chattering Teeth people which are based on the 1950s toy of the same name. These noise makers are up to no good, misdirecting and fuming nonsense. The artist is interested in addressing agents of censorship and their role in obscuring fact from fiction, and how it ultimately destabilizes a society. The plants within the paintings are pulled directly from recent propaganda posters: the light green trees from a “Red Scare” poster of the Joe McCarthy era; flowers from a Russian poster meant to dehumanize the enemy (WWI); larger trees from a poster during the Japanese Internment camp era in America. Trapped in a voyeuristic viewpoint, these paintings are set in concentric textile frames that respond to the image within, or further obstruct the viewer’s peripheral vision. Attuning us to this slippage of perspective, these paintings act as tools to make clear what is affecting our vision.
Following the same concept, Hill’s new Standard Bearers are two ceramic Chattering Teeth people who carry banners into battle, demarcating the boundaries of a temporary resting point for an unseen army. Sitting on a pile of ceramic teeth pulled from past dissonants, they are the most zealous of the group because they are frequently first to be attacked during a battle. Their deaths, and more importantly the fall of the nation's symbol, would be seen as a massive blow to the fighting body's morale. So why do they stand and what do they stand upon? Weaponless and bearing the weight of their nation's legacy, they are made into vessels in the most vacuous sense of the word.
Similarly, with a rich intentional choice of materials, Alex McClay uses emergency blankets that are intrinsically linked to the message of her works. The material itself inspired a series of work that relates to trauma and serves as a metaphorical protectant from the vulnerability of sharing her own stories. Emergency blankets, made of reflective mylar, are cut apart and then pieced together to reveal words and shapes. The practical application for this material is to stay warm and signal for help in emergency situations. In McClay’s work, however, the blankets represent a symbolic means to an end, a protective layer, and an emblem of survival. Survey tape, used to mark and measure land, appears in these textiles as a weaving material. Seed beads, typically used to create clothing and jewelry, are beaded together into written word. These materials are reappropriated and serve as representations of the invisible barriers that guide our everyday lives. They have been taken from their original contexts and transformed to communicate through embedded language. This language, often honest and vulnerable, offers the viewer a glimpse into memories of trauma – of moments when boundaries failed and proved permeable.
McClay is interested in how the interpretation of text may change when presented in unconventional ways, how the written word can take on many meanings simultaneously. Her beaded pages are created from glass beads. Each of these pages contain a short phrase, something that McClay wrote herself. These phrases contain truths she lives by, dark confessions, and questions she believes everyone must eventually ask themselves. In another series of text-based artworks, the artist creates her own 3-Dimension printed beads. An experimental medium at the moment, the material allows her a freedom that is often unavailable when working with found materials.
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Janet Loren Hill is a New York City-based artist, independent curator, and educator whose work exists at the intersection of textiles and painting. Dripping with absurdity she has built a world around the Chattering Teeth and Hammerhead People who play out propaganda techniques within her object-paintings, installations and performances. Hill received an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a BFA from the University of Washington, where she also studied in Rome, Italy as part of the University’s studio art program. She has exhibited at numerous galleries nationally, including Field Projects Gallery (Manhattan, NYC), The Border Project Space (Brooklyn, NYC) and Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston, MA). Her recent solo show, Origin Story, at KAPOW (Tribeca, NYC) received critical acclaim in Widewalls magazine. Hill has participated in multiple residencies internationally, including Wassaic Project, Anderson Ranch, McColl Center, Beijing Royal School and The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA) Studio Program. Hill’s work and curatorial practice has been recognized in Artnet, Hyperallergic, The Boston Globe, Boston Art Review and W Magazine. The booth she co-curated with Jonell Logan for SPRING/BREAK LA 2022 of Taylor Lee Nicholson’s papier-mâché and ceramic work was awarded the first ever Single Palm for Best Curation. In 2017, Hill was spotlighted in the MFA Annual Edition of New American Paintings by Elisabeth Sherman, Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of Art.
Alex McClay lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio as an interdisciplinary artist, a professor in Printmaking at the University of Cincinnati and the 2022 Artist-in-Residence at Tiger Lily Press. She graduated with an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Georgia in 2021. She received her BFA in Photography and Sculpture from the University of Cincinnati in 2014. She was a Core Fellow at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina from 2016-2018, where she studied craft in many forms, including textiles, metals, printmaking, book arts and papermaking. Her current practice engages language, material, and the human body to question and disrupt the power dynamics present in our most intimate and vulnerable spaces. Her work has been included in multiple exhibitions and venues across the United States, including Spring/ Break Art Show NYC (Abigail Ogilvy Gallery), Weston Art Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), ArtSpace (Raleigh, NC), Haggerty Gallery (Dallas TX), Robert C Williams Museum of Papermaking (Atlanta, GA), and Marcia Wood Gallery (Atlanta, GA).
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