TRACK 16
in the Bendix Building, 1206 Maple Ave, #1005, Los Angeles, CA 90015
310-815-8080
www.track16.com

May 14 to July 2, 2022
Public reception: Saturday, May 14 from 6-9pm

Artist Kathleen Henderson’s new exhibition, “Bluebeard and Other Poolings” peers through the looking glass to explore the inner lives of humanity calculating an impending apocalypse. For twenty years Henderson has fashioned blob-like ghosts and beings to expose narcissism, vanity, and feelings of powerlessness in the face of mounting challenges that threaten society and existence itself. Animated in oil stick on paper, her figures assemble in an array of poses that reveal our inability as a collective to gather behind solutions, instead choosing to cheer on chaos or focus on how photogenic we’ll appear in insurrection selfies.

Henderson freely acknowledges the influence of the January 6th insurrection on her current series, and much of her work depicts our brutality and insistence of passing on destructive traditions. Throughout the exhibit, her characters run amok, and hint at the growing radicalism that is infecting every aspect of our society, accumulating not just onlookers but active participants. Bluebearded figures, the personification of murdering misogynists, make multiple appearances including parading their way onto a school board, presumably to ban books and purge curricula. No image more directly addresses the characteristics of crowd mentality than Procession, which eerily mirrors the political pageantry of our former president and his minions on their march to disassemble democracy and establish an exclusionary society.

Many of Henderson’s drawings in the exhibition derive from her self-described “doomsday residency” at 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica which bridged her experience not just during the pandemic, but also through the attempted coup. There, in her month-long solitude, Henderson drew on a daily basis, with news radio filling the space of her studio and imbuing her drawings with a sense of timeliness and urgency behind our societal collapse.

Henderson explains, “Facing the loss of the natural world, there is no time for despair. If you’re despairing, you need to get over it. I hope that these drawings address our singular ineptitude and the necessity to work together as a collective instead of as a collection of individuals.”

The urgency of her greasy lines and the palpable immediacy of her beings build scenes that disturb us with cutting humor. Experiencing her drawings is to hold hands with her while laughing and crying through the pinnacle of fright in a haunted house. Her cartoonish lampooning is a portal to engagement. Henderson remarks, “There's truth in line, there's truth in the details, and there's truth in scale. Tragedy is everywhere but to make it look like comedy, it stops the clock, and opens a small space allowing us to begin contemplating the unimaginable." As critical of her subjects as Henderson can be, there’s also universality – something of self-portraiture in them. We all have weakness, folly, and base desire.

Donald Kuspit, writing in Artforum, explains, "Folly is an old god, celebrated by Erasmus. Stoic comedy is not a bad response to a feeling of meaninglessness; indeed, to laugh at the acedia that art and life seem to have become is self preserving. Humour is the last saving grace – the only way of avoiding self-deception.”