Audio recording

Against the adjacent white wall, a canvas of a vast blue space and a painting of a hazy landscape reference the sky and sunset in David Simpson’s Latterday Battersea and Shawn Huckins’ Evening Glow at Lake Louise: Hey Siri, How Do I Leave the Planet?.  Known for the striped oil paintings that hint at atmospheric landscapes of his early works, David Simpson often references abstracted elements of nature in his paintings. In contrast to the scientific investigation of materiality in Simpson’s color fields, Shawn Huckins’ paintings playfully confront the priorities of our society with sharp humor by layering early American portraiture and landscapes with text taken directly from the internet.

Take a moment to study the towering, blue painting by shifting from side to side. The velvety-surface, variations of color, and texture reveal Simpson’s adept usage of interference paint. Simpson, a reductivist artist, has been important to the California Bay Area art scene since the 1950s and the California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and 70s—which is a movement concerned with how geometric shapes and use of light could affect the environment and perception of the viewer. Working previously with oil paint for much of his career, Simpson began exploring metallic paint and, in the early 1990s, found deep fascination with the mercurial characteristics of interference pigment. Interference paints, which have only six pigment variations, contain micro-particles covered with titanium oxide that reflect and refract light, giving rise to nuances of color and optical illusions of depth. Simpson’s paintings are made through a process that the artist has developed over time, which includes sanding the canvas to a velvety smooth surface in preparation for the interference paints. Applying as many as thirty layers of only one-color pigment of paint to the canvas using a special metal trowel that the artist designed, Simpson creates a modulated surface space with which the paint interacts in ripples and layers. A single color reflects and bends light, creating an optical illusion of color change and depth as the viewer’s perspective moves from one side of the canvas to the other. Meticulously layered to create a rich, lustrous surface, the opalescent colors either shift subtly, for instance from silver to blue, or dramatically, from royal purple to peacock green, depending on the base pigment.

Shawn Huckins is recognized for both his brilliant humor and technical skill as a painter. Huckins’ works are meticulously hand-painted, including the letters of the brazen text he counterposes against serene, classical imagery. Using social media as satirical ammo, Huckins postures whether the devolution of language in the face of technological advancement weakens our ability to empathize and connect to one another in a meaningful way. The portraits, landscapes and pastoral scenes that Huckins repaints are sourced from public domain records and museum collections of classic American paintings. Featured here, is Huckins’ brightly saturated response to Evening Glow at Lake Louise, Rocky Mountains, Canada (1850) by Albert Bierstadt, a German American painter known for his sweeping landscapes of the American West. Bierstadt captured his picturesque sunset of Lake Louise during one of his many journeys of the Westward Expansion during the mid-nineteenth century. Countering the ideas and romanticization of Manifest Destiny, Huckins’ stark words interrupt the hyper pigmented landscape to ask, “Hey Siri, how do I leave the planet?,” as if to remind the viewer of the device-driven pressures of daily life.