Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Erin Hayden
American; 21st-century
Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University
57%
Blood Bath. 2013. Oil, acrylic, and inkjet print on canvas
This piece feels like pastiche for its own sake, rather than towards the end of uncanny (or some other sort of fragmentary) arrangement. One exception is the correspondence between the red dot on the edge of the stretcher and the thick impasto clump of red in the front’s upper right quadrant. But even this flourish calls attention to the fact that the canvas's sides, when they're utilized, are not sufficiently worked over to integrate them into the total artwork. Instead, this lite transgression calls undue attention to what the whole history of Western painting normally allows to be an unactivated, insignificant element of a painting’s overall physical presence: whatever isn’t its surface. This is a poor trade for a cheap effect. Still, though the layering of images and materials is not even close to resolved, the painting offers occasional glimpses of ingenuity, as in the way the red splatter seems to collate all the various representational components that lie beneath it. (2024)