Josephine Halvorson's paintings are painted over the course of a single day but they hold our gaze for much longer.
*Photo above: Josephine Halvorson, Heat 2, 2014. Image courtesy the artist
March 26 - May 31, 2015
Slow Burn gathers a selection of twenty-three oil paintings by Josephine Halvorson, a contemporary artist who orients traditional approaches to painting towards an experiential and environmental art practice. Halvorson paints outdoors, en plein air, in locales across America and the world, translating found objects into images and creating a connection between artist, object and place. Exploring the world at hand, she uncovers the material and local history embodied in post-industrial machines and in architectural structures and surfaces. Halvorson's use of color, wet-on-wet handling, and insistence on painting for uninterrupted periods lend immediacy and intensity to the act of perception. The paintings sustain the slow, absorbed looking suggested by the exhibition's title.
"My practice is one of understanding an object in time: its history, its function, its place in the world, its environment—and my own relationship to it," the artist has said. Halvorson's twenty-three portraits of the inanimate world bear witness to a haptic encounter between herself, her subject, the material of paint, plus time.
Josephine Halvorson: Slow Burn and the Main Gallery exhibition, Alternative Modernisms look to expand our sense of the contemporary through artists who negotiate the past, intervening in pictorial traditions and accounts of history.
Curated by Cora Fisher, SECCA Curator of Contemporary Art.