REPRESENTATION
SEARS-PEYTON GALLERY: New York City + LA
contact: info@searspeyton.com
ARUSHA GALLERY: London + Edinburgh
contact: info@arushagallery.com
BDDW: New York City + London
contact: info@bddw.com
CV
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Jen Wink Hays is a painter and sculptor based in Philadelphia, PA. Her oil paintings are characterized by her use of a bold, dissonant color palette that blends subdued earthy tones with aggressive, synthetic neons. Incomplete visual layers also convey struggle and resolution in Hays' work. There is a push/pull between what is shown and what is concealed as if something is at once being covered over and peeled away. Says the artist, "I'm interested in 'the glimpse' and the way that partially obscuring something or keeping it hidden can give it more power - and energize what remains in view. I am also drawn to the way this sets up a truly dynamic, unpredictable visual field where unintentional collisions of color and form can take place." Hays work in sculpture encompasses a variety of familiar, user-friendly mediums including paper pulp, paper mache, plaster and clay. The resulting groupings of colorful, eccentric forms—sometimes geometric sometimes more biomorphic—play off of Hays’ oil paintings.
Hays has exhibited nationally and internationally, including New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, London, Edinburgh and Milan. Her work is included in the permanent collection at the Zillman Art Museum. Hays' recent solo shows include Obstacle Course (2022) with Arusha Gallery in both London and Bruton locations, Valley Low (2021) at the Zillman Art Museum, Wondrous Ponderous (2019) and Playing Field (2018) both with Sears Peyton Gallery in New York City. In 2017, Hays' brought her show Vacationland to Miami's Wynwood art district with Art Bastion Gallery.
Hays is originally from a quaint, small town in coastal Maine. She moved to New York City as a teenager to attend Barnard College and has lived in big cities ever since. Today she lives and works in Philadelphia with her kids and husband, fellow painter Tyler Hays.
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“Hays’ career stretches back to her days at Barnard College where she began painting in 1991, through an early career painting in her studio on Lafayette Street in New York City. Having founded Utility Design and co-founded the influential Blue School in New York, Hays moved to Philadelphia in 2015, where she and her husband Tyler Hays and children live in the thick stone walls of a renovated former school—its masonry silence and relative height preserving a feeling of sanctuary.
Out the studio windows, the cheerfully varied buildings of Philadelphia butt against each other; in the cool light of the studio, Hays’ paintings grow and pile. Built and excavated, they are topographical. These forms mound over each other or stack in towers. At times, they grow according to an inner but alien organic logic, like alien fauna photosynthesizing under a new sun. “I do feel sometimes like I’m creating a jungle where things grow a little differently,” Hays explains.
In Hays’ painting Growing Season (2019), color forms stack up and stick to each other, clumping in a prismatic mound. From the painting’s bottom edge, forms grow. Trunks sprout. Organic shapes in emerald-green, bubblegum pink, and marigold-orange congregate or even cling to each other under what could be a beige-pink sky. In the painting’s right quarter, a single tulip-shaped appendage banded in raucous shades of bright pink reaches upward—a sticky weathervane aloft in the opaque firmament. Across two and three dimensions, Hays’ forms jump from paintings to sculpture and back again, swinging cartoonlike between canny and un.
In the even light and stillness of Hays’ studio, her works heckle and rebel, displacing the ordinary, submerging and interrupting it with new depths and volumes. These paintings and sculptures borrow fathoms from the sea; they look out on the built world and the natural rubbing against each other; they pull sweaty air from an invented jungle. They pile up, the float, they fly off, they live.”
excerpt from “Wonderous Ponderous; Essay” by Amy Rahn
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“Jen Wink Hays paints with the canvas flat on her studio table, peering down into its emergent world like a bird in the sky. Playful and beguiling, her paintings and works on paper induce a sense of wonder, curiosity and even elation. It is a feeling akin to looking out of the airplane window flying high above the clouds, perhaps en route to a favourite place. […]
“I am originally from a beautiful, small town in coastal Maine where I experienced a salty-air childhood directly from the pages of a Robert McCloskey book. I moved to New York City as a teenager to attend Barnard College and have somehow lived in big cities ever since,” says Hays.
A sense of dreamtime is of particular relevance to the work of Hays. Captivating at first glance, both the repetition of form and a distinctly aerial perspective give her work a familiar, almost cartographic aspect. We intuit her paintings as an imaginative landscapes. Certain aspects of her work draw parallels with the Dreamings of Aboriginal artists, recalling memories of their native landscape through naive mapping. The term is used to describe relations and balance between the spiritual, natural and moral elements of the world.
One might imagine she is channelling memories from her childhood whilst working from her studio in Pennsylvania, near the home which she shares with her husband artist Tyler Hays and their children. Her titles too reinforce this sense of a landscape observed from above: Moving Ridge, Sunken Meadow, Hidden Causeway, Field and Stream and Other Things. Mapping somewhere, in particular a feeling about a place, is central to the interpretation of her work, but the process is less about nostalgia and more about creating uninhibited. […]
Locating the work in an actual place however, is far too simplistic a reading of the work. Just as a first visit somewhere or a chance encounter might spark curiosity, the key to appreciating these works is to look more deeply. Step into the work and you will discern a sophisticated interplay of multiple layers, which both obscure and secure the biomorphic forms within. These units of pattern are comprised of bounded areas or volumes that contain a repeating combination of elements and number of colours.
Unlike Aboriginal Dreamings which call a specific terrain to mind, these biomorphic forms are brought forth unconsciously in a kind surrealist automatism – one that channels an inner state rather than any specific place. Hays begins each new work from this unselfconscious position: each mark on the canvas informs the next, giving a rhythm and flow to the work and a sense of organic growth.
Surrealist automatism is a method of making art in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind free reign. Pioneered by the Dadaist Andre Masson, other notable artists who used the method include Jean Arp, Salvador Dali and Joan Miro whose work was “a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike”. .[1] His pictorial language, with its instantly recognisable motifs, marked a soulful connection to the landscape of his childhood. Still a popular starting point for artists like James Hunter or and Frances Aviva Blane, this method liberates the artist from rational control and allows them to discover the unchartered territories of their subconscious mind.
“Lately my work has become much looser and more gestural as I’ve moved from gouache back to oil paint. It has been a revelation for me in terms of process and the experience of art making.”
The strength of Hays process and resulting images lies in what she does next, after this initial outpouring. She intervenes: building up the painting through a series of increasingly controlled layers. This intervention, like a zoom in zoom out, is also procedurally connected to our constant toggle between the organic and the synthetic. Her use of colour too conveys this delicate interplay, often blending earthy tones with riotous neons. It is the plane in the sky, above the clouds.
This first layer of intuitive, automatic and unconscious marking gives each painting an authentically Hays signature.
“I like to play with dispersement as if the individual forms in a painting are responding to an unseen force. I like to close in on detailed under-paintings with lush fields of opaque oil paint. Painting in distinct, incomplete layers allows me to explore the idea of concealing and revealing — an active process of choosing what to present outwardly and what to keep under wraps.”
The thick, impasto layers of paint that follow are like the safety and convention of clothes after a day frolicking on the beach, or hiding under the blankets. Herein likes the beauty and charm of the work, a dual rhythm that invites deeper knowledge.
“Even though this tends to be an additive, building process, I am actively working with the notion of excavation as well. I imagine that by painting in this way, I am something of an archeologist toiling away to reveal hidden, long-forgotten information.”
There is something soothing in this process, and it brings us back to this position of floating. We might be looking down at a blanket of clouds or at the sky reflected in the water. Hays gives us her Miami dreaming with the works in Vacationland, and brings a fresh and vivid perspective on this magical city.
Nico Kos Earle