Installation view of Spotlight: Shara Hughes at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2022
Photography by Steven Probert
Spotlight: Shara Hughes
MARCH 12-APRIL 9, 2022
The FLAG Art Foundation’s Spotlight exhibition series includes new or never-before-exhibited artworks accompanied by commissioned pieces of writing. On view May 11-June 4, 2022, the inaugural Spotlight features Shara Hughes’s My Violet Lullaby, 2021, with a text by art writer and researcher Maddie Klett.
On Shara Hughes’s ‘My Violet Lullaby,’ 2021
By Maddie Klett
Shara Hughes pointed to “the purple one” when I asked which painting in her studio she planned to show at FLAG. The singularity of that descriptor, the purple one, adequality portrays the dominance of the color when it appears in a painter’s pallet. Purple’s power—or baggage depending on your preference—is precisely the challenge that excited Hughes when making the work. In the foreground of this vertical scene, she painted square-ish patches of violet next to its lilac and magenta peers, dappled with shards of cream, maroon, and salmon. From this ground, the erect leaves of green, fern-like plants ascend toward a grouping of orange and vermillion trees, which clear to reveal a lilac horizon with a full, blue moon.
Or sun. The time of day is unclear. The painting’s title My Violet Lullaby, 2021, suggests the former, even if certain moments of radiance indicate sunshine; there is remarkable visibility through the trees to stripes of blue and cream and a field of (what looks like) bright yellow wheat glistening on the horizon line. My Violet Lullaby might just visualize one of those rare nights when the moon shines so bright that new hues materialize. Hughes propels purple to the emotive range of blue, yellow, or green, liberating it from its routinely moody associations.
Purple has an undeniable polarity—you either love it or hate it—and this likely results from the vibrance in how it hits the human eye. Violet, Hughes’s painting’s namesake, is the color with the highest frequency in the rainbow; it visibly hums. That quality holds weight: my most vivid childhood recollections are of priests wearing bright violet robes for mass in the season of lent. In ancient Rome, the dye for Tyrian purple (aka Phoenician red, Phoenician purple, royal purple, imperial purple, or imperial dye) was made from the mucus of Murex snails, and the hue symbolized wealth and royalty because the cost of the dye was exponentially expensive. All of this is to say, my personification of the hue is that it is a bit extra. For My Violet Lullaby, Hughes manages to wrangle violet into the soft background for the painting’s whispery, moonlit, quilted vision.
These are my entry points into My Violet Lullaby. Indeed, the notion of how a viewer enters and exits each painting is on Hughes’s mind as she constructs compositions. It is why most of her paintings approach a horizon line, even if the majority of what’s depicted is abstract. For Hughes, each scene resolves itself. In the artist’s words from a recent interview, “I take you to the edge, but I don’t go off of it…[the horizon] is the little signal that you are SOMEWHERE”[1]
During our visit, Hughes spoke about starting each canvas with abstract, gestural strokes. She paints a block of color or makes a series of marks with acrylic paint and sometimes dyes the canvas to create stained blotches. These are prompts from which she builds, plays around, and problem solves. Each painting illustrates a different road map as she makes her way back to the horizon line. That hint of figuration is her exit—like grasping one’s pillow after waking up from a particularly lucid dream.
Three tall paintings, each the size of My Violet Lullaby (8 x 6 feet), lean against Hughes’s studio wall the day I visited. The height of each work almost touches the ceiling and she noted this is the largest scale she can achieve in this particular space. We're Still In The Weeds, Healthy Support Systems, and My Violet Lullaby, all 2021, each extends the wingspan of a human and, when lined up, they perform as three doorways into their own distinct worlds. Describing her large paintings as interior or psycho-landscapes, Hughes sees no solid geographic reference point amongst them other than the catalogue of images in her noggin.
Hughes’s earlier paintings depict interior domestic spaces and her process of building form is detectable in those arrangements of beams, flooring, and furnishings. The gridded skylights in Like night and day, 2009, at once reveal patches of daytime clouds and a star-studded nighttime sky. It’s a surrealist mishmash in the spirit of René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières, 1961, and a telling precursor to the uncannily familiar, place-less places in her recent endeavors.
Any number of art historical comparisons could further substantiate Hughes’s style, but each of her paintings is distinctly of her hand, and not in a serial way. They seem primed to stand alone; each is its own swirling little world. Like purple, I am tempted to personify My Violet Lullaby like any human or animal encounter. Entering in, positioning myself, coming to some sort of conclusion, and moving on. Like the experience of moving through the world, My Violet Lullaby is equal parts satisfying and strange.
About:
Shara Hughes (b. 1981) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Hughes earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, in 2004, and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Shara Hughes, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2022); On Edge, CAM St Louis, MO (2021); The Bridge, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2021); Shara Hughes, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2021); Pivot, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2021); among others. Hughes’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at venues such as the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2021); Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, TX (2019); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2018); and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2015); among others. Hughes was also included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Her work is included in museum collections including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; the Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Jorge M. Perez Collection, Miami, FL; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta, GA; the M Woods Museum, Beijing, China; the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX; the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; the Si Shang Art Museum, Beijing, China; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY; among others.
Maddie Klett is an art writer and researcher living in Brooklyn, NY. Klett received an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA, in 2018, and was a 2014-2015 U.S. Fulbright Student Fellow to Sri Lanka. She was a curatorial writer for the 2018 Kochi-Muzuris Biennale in India and her writing has appeared in Art in America, Art Practical, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Burnaway, frieze, KQED, Momus, Open Space, and SSENSE.