PRESS RELEASE
Del Vaz Projects is pleased to present Reflexions, a two-person exhibition bringing together Michael Henry Hayden’s painted wall reliefs and Anne Libby’s polished aluminum sculptures. In the works on view, both artists make use of ubiquitous domestic paraphernalia as substrates in which unstable and ambivalent narratives are built upon.
In Hayden’s three wall reliefs (all 2015), identical arrangements of wall, light switch, trim, door and chain lock are serially repeated. Utilizing classic painting techniques such as chiaroscuro and referencing film noir and neo-noir lighting treatments, Hayden then paints each three-dimensional construction to reflect distinct domestic scenes. These scenes progress from the hyperreal, like the shadows cast by morning light passing through shutters, and become increasingly emotional – like a menacing red light slicing through Venetian blinds à l'heure entre chien et loup. And finally, an inexplicable combination of light and color meet in a state of heightened psychological excitement.
With her most recent series of sculptures, Libby continues to cast arrangements of Venetian blinds out of Aluminum, and polishes them to a mirrored finish. In a seemingly paradoxical gesture, the artist fuses together window and blind, coaxing the refractive quality of glass onto the blind to create objects that are simultaneously opaque and impervious but full of light, depth and perspective. The gestural and ephemeral meet the permanence of sculpture.
Hayden and Libby’s works are contemplations on the threshold. From the interior, doors, windows and blinds allow us to control what is revealed, shared and hidden with the outside. These works, however, are not concerned with whoever or whatever lies beyond but rather something far more elusive – who or what it faces. Although their impenetrability is “porified” by the shadows painted on them or the light they deflect, what gives way is a mirroring, a reflection, or rather a reflex-ion, where work (subject) and viewer (object) are fused together.
Michael Henry Hayden (b. 1981, Siloam Springs, Arkansas) received his MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and his BFA from Cooper Union, New York. Recent exhibitions include Moskowitz-Bayse, Los Angeles; Team Gallery, New York; Left Field Gallery, San Luis Obispo; M+B, Los Angeles; Galerie Xippas, Paris; ACME., Los Angeles; Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles; LA><ART, Los Angeles, among others.
Anne Libby (b. 1987, Los Angeles, California) has had recent solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Ribordy Thetaz, Geneva; Magenta Plains, New York, NY; Soft Opening, London, The Downer, Berlin; Zak's Project Space, New York; Violet's Cafe, Brooklyn; and Metropolitan Structures, Baltimore. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles; Josh Lilley Gallery, London; Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami; Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York among others. She has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, Artsy, Mousse Magazine, and Emulsion Magazine, among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
