Time Is Elastic In 'History Lessons’, An Exhibition By Mimi Jung And Delphine Hennelly
As implied by its name, ‘History Lessons’ illustrates an aesthetic collapse of time. The exhibition, which ran earlier this year in New York at Carvalho Park, featured pieces inspired by traditional tapestries from artists Mimi Jung and Delphine Hennelly.
Working across mediums, both New York-based Hennelly and Los Angeles-based Jung engage with textile traditions in ways that are uniquely their own. In this exhibition Hennelly, primarily a figurative painter, presents a series of works where familiar and somewhat banal motifs are repeated in a saccharine color palette. A ubiquitous couple and dog feature multiple times in paintings colored with a playful hand. Across the other canvases, a blanket of multi-colored flowers finds form again and again. In these works, Hennelly is seeking to represent the weft and weave of textiles with her paint; her heavy horizontal strokes recalling both the lines of traditional tapestries, and those of contemporary glitches. Through the repetition of these benign images, time is called into question.
Jung approaches the theme differently: as a fiber artist, her work utilizes the ancient techniques that Hennelly’s paint seeks to emulate. Yet, rather than communicate a narrative figuratively as tapestries once did, Jung’s fiber works are abstract and tactile. As much sculptures as they are two-dimensional pieces, they too play on a repetition of formal elements and have a strange dislocation of depth.
