Time Sensitive
Sarah Brook Gallery, Los Angeles
Sarah Brook Gallery is thrilled to announce “Time Sensitive,” the gallery’s second solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist, Cheryl Humphreys. With this new body of work, the artist leaves behind the less sustainable aspects of printmaking and fully integrates holistic alternatives: natural plant dyes, hand-cut chipboard stencils, and printing with sunlight. Color and texture ebb and flow according to the passage of time. Experience gives way to experiment. Plan becomes play.
Whilst all of Humphreys’ works take paper as their baseline support, the final pieces (often appearing like mosaics or weavings) offer surface textures reminiscent of denim, satin or suede. A range of patinas with a bodily imprint manifest from the artist’s meticulous and ritualistic dyeing methods. The title work of the exhibition, Time Sensitive, is comprised of repeated compositional elements laid in the sun for varying time-frames: row one’s elements having been exposed for five hours, row nine’s for seven full days. The effect is a shimmering narrative that brings to mind mid-century textile design and also the evolution of the camera. Tidal I and Tidal II, meanwhile, are made of complimentary paper components hand-dipped in indigo vats anywhere from once for 30 seconds to ten times over three weeks to dry myriad layers of natural color into the paper fibers.
Exhibited here for the first time, the artist’s new series of Security Blankets are woven tapestries of up-cycled security envelopes Humphreys has been collecting since age 18. As they bake in the evolution of mass-produced paper design over decades, these works further emphasize the passage of time in Humphreys’ practice. Now, as the artist approaches motherhood, the Security Blanket works also carry postnatal images of warmth and soothing alongside memories of our parent’s generation of paper billing systems and stacks of responses-by-mail.
Like a recipe passed down through the ages, Humphreys’ artwork engages a rich lineage of process-driven making. She evokes, in particular, women artists at the heart of Modernism, such as Anni Albers and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, who reframed the dialogues around art and design, paper, textiles and collage. Simultaneously, Humphreys’ heightened attention to formal elements (purity of line, color and form) hint at Minimalism, achieving a balanced simplicity similar to that of Agnes Martin, whose pared-down compositions carry inverse proportions of gravitas and strength. Like Martin, Humphreys derives powerful meaning from how she makes, exploring rich human histories, discoveries in the natural world, as well as connections to and amplifications of her own life’s process.
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Photos by Ruben Diaz
Words by Blair Taylor
Video footage by Emmy Laine
Editing by Mike McMullen