Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Elegy, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Stephen Hayes. For this solo exhibition, his 24th with the gallery, Hayes presents two distinct but related bodies of work: Elegy and Wild Beauty: Remembered.
The works in this exhibition mark a change in emphasis for the esteemed Portland based artist. Hayes has established his reputation in the region as a maker of exquisite images focused on the landscape of the Northwest.
Over the past ten years Hayes has systematically, and with consciousness, brought his attention to the political content inherent in landscape imagery. In 2018, Hayes was named a John S. Guggenheim Fellow in Visual Art on the strength of his ongoing body of work, entitled In the Hour Before, addressing gun violence in America. The landscape images in those paintings remain beautiful to contemplate, even as the dark content surrounding the impetus to make them haunts each one.
With Elegy, Hayes asks us to bring our attention to the immediate and historic tragedy of war. In this case, it is the war in Gaza. These twelve, large, non-image-based paintings form a cycle that repeats ad infinitum and are arranged as either single panels or diptych pairings; an arrangement that will change three times over the run of the exhibition. The consequence of repeated re-pairing provokes an unsettling sense of impermanence and dislocation. In all of his paintings, color is paramount, and certainly in these works, as it is color that is asked to convey the soul of each artwork.
Hayes redirects his attention with the works on paper in the series Wild Beauty: Remembered. Working with the master printers at Mullowney Printing, the artist explores historical photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, non-ironic documents of Manifest Destiny in action, and translates them into multi-paneled monotypes in acrid hues and disjointed vistas.
A public conversation between Stephen Hayes and David Naimon, award-winning author and host of the literary podcast Between the Covers, is scheduled for Saturday November 1st at 11:00AM.
