Preview: Multiplicity Opens in Hillcrest
This review originally appeared in the May 16 and 17 edition of the Courier in Russellville, AR
Ashley Kinsey, Lynette Gilbert, and Kasten Searles are no strangers to working together. They’ve been teaching in the Arkansas Tech Art department together since 2022. The three of them have had at least two other group shows that included the three of them. So, when the Hillcrest-based Gallery26 wanted to feature their work together, it wasn’t a question of if they’d work together, but how.
Their works vary wildly, but each woman was candid about the fact that what was most surprising was that they could find time at all to create and present new work. Kinsey will move into a full-time art history role in the fall, but she’s been balancing the admin for the art department while adjuncting multiple classes. Searles is the head of the art department at Tech as well as an illustrator with the Arkansas Times and she works with the Arkansas Heritage Museum, designing installations and doing illustration work for their permanent collections. Gilbert is an art professor and director of Tech’s arts education program.
What gets lost in these commitments to other people’s education and creative development is, most often, the time and energy for their own creative work.
“When we started talking about the show, we joked about calling it ‘Triple-Booked,’” Searles confessed when I went to see her at her office. “We’re all in this position of not really having time to make work, but having the commitment of the show forced us to make space.”
“I still really like that title,” Kinsey added from the other room. They’d agreed to me a preview of the show as some of the pieces were heading to the gallery in Little Rock later in the day. Gilbert was unavailable when I met with them but sent along her artist statement and photos of some of her work that will be displayed.
Never mind that the women are employed at the same place, their work displays their disparate experiences and myriad world views. The faces and figures of women recur throughout the work that will be displayed, each artist working through an emphasis on observation and capturing essences but filtered through their personal experiences. What gets shown, what gets observed, emphasized, remembered, created, and how varies wildly between each artist.
Kinsey works in black and white, favoring detailed charcoal drawings of figures and animals, including detailed diagrams of animal’s anatomical systems, cribbed from old zoology textbooks. There’s a tension in the work between what is shown and what is hidden. The rigorously detailed work emphasizes the overlooked or, in the case of the reproductive systems of pigeons, that which is obscured in daily observation.
“Looking at the old zoology textbooks is always fascinating. The were limited by what they could know and see, so know we’re able to tell what the inaccuracies are. I like those inaccuracies,” she said. “All my work has its own inaccuracies.” Even the most intense scruinty will miss something.
Her new work in the show is a series of three nude figures that unfold in a progression. The head and faces remain shadowed, the figures isolated in darkness. The light, and the attention of artist and viewer, falls on areas of close and extreme attention. The aliveness of figures and hands, the realism of shadow and curves. The rigorous attention to these details is balanced by the use of blank space and swaths of shadows that enclose the figures. All that matters found in the emptiness, held in the darkness, but opening to itself and to us anyways.
Where Kinsey’s details are emphasized in shades of black and white, Searles and Gilbert’s work both display vivid colors and use layered mediums.
Based on a creativity challenge done for the first time in 2018, Searles pulls from a kind of visual dairy for her work in this show. Her pieces are digital creations that layer watercolor backgrounds with found objects, photography, and illustration, pulling on all the mediums and contexts that interest her.
“I was trained in graphic design and painting, but I fell in love with illustration. I like to think I’m all three,” Searles said.
The backgrounds are a wobbly and ethereal splash of color that the other observations are layered over. The instant caught in a Polaroid camera, the meeting or event reduced to a ticket stub or receipt, the observed event or meeting recreated in illustration. They are a collection of impressions layered together, of senses and sensations recreated in color and form. There’s a focus on moments, on piecing them together in a way that is not quite whole but asks to examine their relationship anyways. The works become something other than a dairy, removed from the personal experiences and rendered as observation.
Gilbert’s work uses repeated forms and imagery, recreating the same figures with different textures, backgrounds, and colors. Her work is richly patterned and deeply textured. While Searles technique utilizes different mediums and then renders them digitally, incorporating the differences into a singularity, Gilbert’s work retains the textures and depths of application. Her work includes shredded paper mixed into acrylic paint, three-dimensional additions to the canvas, and the use of fabric.
There’s a consistency of image, the side profile of a woman with three buns down the middle of her hair and earrings affixed to the canvas, is configured and reconfigured against changing patterns. The works are visibly layered and intentional bold, mixing patterns and colors. There are layers of paint, vibrant backgrounds that are then covered in repeating designs and patterns, layered with the repeated images and more mixed media. The same woman’s profile repeats, but also changes, a shape that takes on many textures and patterns.
Gilbert sees her work as directly exploring her experiences as a black woman and the stories of black women. For her, the mixed mediums, the visible layers of application are the spaces and places in which she explores what it means to be a black woman, what it means to make and be made by her experiences.
“As a visual artist my goal is to continue to convey my faith, the black experience, and the stories told through the lens of black women,” Gilbert’s statement reads.
The women landed on the title of Multiplicity as a nod to the distinct approaches and outcomes of their creative works, but also it manages to capture how each of them contains their own multitudes. The various accuracies and inaccuracies of Kinsey’s work, the play of light and dark and of blankness and detail. For Searles it is the amalgamation of moments that turn into days, that coalesce, ultimately, into a life. And for Gilbert the play of repetition and sameness against the rich differences and variety of colors and details. Each woman is working in their areas of interest while dealing with their opposite, opening in their work to questions and observation, foreclosing a sense of knowing, but remaining steadfast in their observations.
Multiplicity will be on display at Gallery 26 in Little Rock from May 16 through July 11 with an opening reception on Saturday May 16 at 6pm. Kinsey, Searles, and Gilbert teach in the art department at Arkansas Tech University. Their work will show together again in the fall as part of the faculty biennial gallery show.
