SELECTED PRESS / CATALOGUE EXCERPTS
The explosive abstractions of Amanda Hughen – in her words, “part
biology, part geology, part astronomy, part architecture” –
are drawn on both sides of one or two sheets of drafting film, creating
layers of image and opacity, and making the paper itself an active part
of the work. From 1999 to 2005, Hughen worked in three-dimensions. Her layered
sculptures led to the layered drawings, which maintain an object-presence
that is unusual for works on paper. Gossamer-like at first glance, their
delicacy belies their intricacy, and their strength.
It’s impossible to look at Hughen’s drawings and not make associations,
but there is no definitive answer, no right or wrong, and that ambiguity
pleases her. She watches Nova and reads science books (might her
pictures depict cellular creation, or destruction? Biological growth, or
decay? Perhaps its the moment when they meet – but with a crash, or
a kiss?) Since the mid-’90s, she has haunted flea markets for engineering
and architectural templates (no longer needed by architects, the computer
has made them obsolete). Tracing the shapes repeatedly, and welcoming the
accidents that her hand creates, it is this geometry that forms the basis
for the organic shapes in her drawings. She is a close observer of her immediate,
urban landscape as well (a landscape made of geometric shapes: sidewalks,
streets, buildings). She works fast, moving around her studio like a dancer,
turning one sheet of film over to draw while another dries. In Hughen’s
drawings, as with dance, there is much to be felt in the spaces between
the movements.
Excerpt from the catalogue, Sid Garrison / Amanda Hughen: Drawings, Marella Consolini, Knoedler Project Space, April – July 2009
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Amanda Hughen paints the prettiest germs. Of course, though the San Francisco–based artist gives her recent mixed-media works on drafting film suggestive names like Consumptia (pictured) and Polyviral, their organic forms are unlikely to visit your day-old tacos. Thanks to their complexity, Hughen’s abstract, biomorphic shapes fascinate. Cell-like structures executed in pencil, ink and paint—primarily in girly hues of pink, purple and turquoise—overlap. The artist works on both sides of her translucent vellum and often layers multiple sheets, embedding a dizzying range of colors and textures in each piece.
Excerpt from Golden Ratio at David Weinberg Gallery, Lauren Weinberg, Time Out Chicago, June 16, 2009
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Hughen's drawings filter artistic improvisation through what would appear (to those of a painterly and expressionist bent) a procrustean formal regimen. The slight fading and halation of colored pencil and silk-screened lines as seen through the translucent film allows her work to breathe in a shallow pictorial space, as if submerged in or occluded by water or atmosphere; we also think of the gradation of focus in microscopes and sonograms, in which a slight adjustment in focus moves you in or out in visual space. This initial drawing she then modifies and elaborates; in some works she draws cartoonish blobs, like chromosomes, in pentagonal clusters; in others she creates floral motifs with densely packed lines/stamens terminated with pollen-like dots of acrylic paint. The effect is partly an image of Creation (like the recent Big Bang astrophysical photos), and partly a metaphor for spontaneous growth (or perhaps creativity). Hughen's imaginative portmanteau word titles reflect this multivalence: Andromatic, Feastory, Engorget and Relevation yield varying and contradictory associations; in a radiating, centerless, protoplasmic universe, everything gets along and coexists.
DeWitt Cheng
Excerpt from Transtructural at Johansson Projects, Artweek, November 2007 (Cover image: Amanda Hughen, Feastory)
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Hughen's imagery is simultaneously scientific, synthetic and organic, but its essence is its ethereal beauty. Hughen is making some of the densest art produced today, layering pattern upon pattern and color upon color, creating multiple levels for viewers to excavate visually.
When Hughen begins her paintings, she has no preconceived notion of what the final image will be. She begins by drawing a geometric pattern using architectural and engineering templates collected from yard sales. She then silkscreens this image onto both sides of a sheet of translucent Mylar, which is the support for the painting. Next, by hand, she spontaneously works by hand both sides of the Mylar with ink, paint and pencil. Gradually, one side emerges as the front, and, as she puts it, "a picture happens." Her imagery suggests landscapes, cellular forms, strange plant life and oceanic islands seen from high above. They are simultaneously scientific, synthetic and organic. But their essence is their ethereal beauty, brought about by a delicate linearity as well as gossamer-thin layers of pigment.
Joseph Jacobs
Excerpt from Strange Forces: Four Painters Create, Emerging Artist, Art & Antiques, June 2007
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Amanda Hughen's drawings on Mylar take their images from biology, architecture, geology and topology. The marks on Mylar are made with ink, graphite and acrylic. "Managed Disclosure," on display at Marcia Wood Gallery, is an appropriately titled piece from 2006 that is purely abstract in that the forms don't literally refer to any of the sources that inspired them. Yet the piece is vaguely topological and, less vaguely, biological, suggesting cell division, mapping of terrain and the complex petals and flowerheads of certain plant species.
It isn't any of these things, however. It's an image that functions on its own, and as such it represents purely the things that happen when complementary and contrasting colors are put together with lines borrowed from various academic disciplines from mathematics to biological illustration. Like the San Francisco artist's other works, "Managed Disclosure" is aesthetically seductive; smart in its selection of bits of the world, it is singularly beautiful in the everyday sense of that word. It is, thus, a drawing that draws us in.
Jerry Cullum
Excerpt from Object Lessons: A Topology that Pleases, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 2007
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The marks Hughen makes are repetitive, uniform, and mechanical. The artist strives to remove herself — her hand, her judgment, her experiences — from their creation, allowing the process to take over and this new world to form its own geological history. Bunched together, the shapes coalesce into undulating and overlapping patterns that resemble eons of physical upheaval compressed into a single space and moment.
Multiple histories collapse and intertwine upon each other.... Unfettered by scale, these panoramas are as intimate as they are vast.... We as viewers are caught between a state of suspension and submersion, hovering above these topographies and crashing down into them when we shift from observing the whole in order to focus on a detail.
Patricia Maloney
Excerpt from Firmament: Amanda Hughen and Arngunnur Yr, November 2005
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Amanda Hughen’s works suggest material confusion: Are these works hanging on and off the walls made of paper? Are they drawings? Objects? This mutation continues onto the surfaces of the pieces with the application of screenprinting, contact paper, and the use of wood-graining tools. The works are filled with marks, all of which are taken from architectural templates; there are no freehand gestures. Using found objects such as the bright plastic grass included with take-out sushi, hair extensions, an office carpet sample, packing materials, or a plastic log casing, she reinvents these items by burying them under rectangular incisions in the thick, semi-opaque material.
Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson
Excerpt from Far Away Nearby, Berkeley Art Museum, May 2003
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Hughen’s art...displays a repetition of forms with almost hyperbolic insistence, mimick-ing the processes of standardization and serialization inherent in systems of mass production. Hughen appropriates forms from architectural and typographic templates, ..but in her hands, these mass-produced forms fail to achieve their standardized perfection. Imperfections arise as forms butt up against each other, overlap, and partially dissolve. It is in this gap between standardization and irregularity, between order and chaos, that Hughen’s art is staged.
Sharon Corwin and Beth Dungan
Excerpt from Between Chaos and Order: Dialectical Systems and the Work of Amanda Hughen, Townsend Center for the Humanities, October 2002
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The act or art of seeing is of utmost concern in Amanda Hughen’s work ....an ongoing visual dialogue with the otherwise unnoticed built landscape, compiling a photographic inventory of what she calls the “chance emergence of unintentional beauty.” The process of constructing new landscapes, a labor-intensive and improvisatory process... becomes the ground for what could be thought of as a practice of philosophical inquiry into the construction of visible meaning.
David Buuck
Excerpt from Amanda Hughen & The Aesthetics Of The Vernacular Landscape, WORK magazine, June 2001