Tinsquo’s curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Inhabited: Paintings by Alexandra Peace & Sarah Hombach.
Whether depicting her friends or passersby, Alexandra Peace scribbles her way to an image with frantic affection. When drawing strangers, she enjoys the opportunity to “create intimacy out of a moment without familiarity” – her work permits a similar intimacy to its viewers. Her loose, somewhat turbulent process is readily legible, inviting us to participate in the vicarious pleasure of each scratch, stroke and squiggle. Peace views her work as practice of “reining in chaos,” creating portraits and scenes that are at once tenderly messy and masterfully precise.
Sarah Hombach’s work seeks to represent the way a body might be experienced from its inside. The anatomical impossibilities in her figures – and the equally impossible worlds these figures populate – continue this project of portraying things psychically “inside out.” Informed by her dreams and daily settings, Hombach uses painting as a means of furnishing her own interior life; she externalizes her emotions and circumstances by giving them an architecture, curtains, garnishes, weather. She combines these with swooshes of the fantastic in faith that viewers may cobble together her personal iconography, as well as lift her little oft-gawky figures to the level of heroes.
Inhabited is on view through September 29 at the Adjacent to Life pop-up gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). The opening is Thursday, August 22, 7-9 pm.