ROTATOR

SARAH HOTCHKISS

EXHIBITION DATES:
SEPTEMBER 12 - OCTOBER 26, 2024

Made in San Francisco and the snowy wilds of Wyoming, Rotator features a new series of hard edge, high contrast paintings that pull from a saturated world brimming with overlooked curiosities. With sources countless and unexpected — a Tenderloin corner store sign, a knight’s uncrossed path (2 over, 1 up), illuminated manuscripts, and free-floating imagery from the preschool toy bin — Hotchkiss’ playful paintings investigate the mesmerizing design of puzzles, games, and everyday patterns encountered in the course of her daily life.

Familiar, yet somehow disquietingly different and off kilter, Hotchkiss’ labyrinthine universe plays with the mind, dreams, space and time. As the eye wanders over her deliberately constructed interplay of graphic, maze-like compositions, it is easy to wonder if Hotchkiss finds inspiration among a cool, secret society of astronomers, engineers, mathematicians, metaphysicians, and geometricians.

The experience is circuitous, similar to a Borges poem: “The galleries seem straight but curve furtively, forming secret circles at the terminus of years.” Like tangled little mysteries (coincidentally, the artist listens to a lot of detective novels), her paintings possess their own tricksy logic — lines that loop endlessly, pathways that lead to other pathways, symbols that circle back to the beginning or spiral into fractal copies. While enigmatic, the paintings do not conceal their logic; they belong to a quirky world where viewers can delight in the opportunity to aimlessly stumble, get lost, and visually wander.

Hotchkiss’ gouache, flashe and acrylic paintings offer up the whimsy and fanciful ethos of a Mary Heilmann, intermingled with the precision and execution of a Bridget Riley. Simultaneous points of contact between weird, off key colors, scintillating edges that come from adjacent colors of similar value, over-under-over interlacing of lines between foreground and background, keep the viewer on their toes. The compositions are done with an exacting free hand and involve a dizzying number of hours spent sketching, plotting, calculating, and wrestling the surface into the flattest, smoothest plane possible.

As many of the titles suggest (Young Time, Brief Sun, Daylight Society, Socked In), the paintings are simultaneously a musing on the absurdity of time and the human compulsion towards categorizing it. “I think a lot about how much time they take to make,” Hotchkiss writes. “Is this the best use of my time? Why is this how I spend my time?” Amidst these odd, mini adventures, the artist puzzles out possibilities, directional enigmas, and circles back to the ultimate conclusion: “this is one of my favorite ways to spend my time.”

Sarah Hotchkiss (B.A. Brown University, M.F.A. California College of the Arts) is a San Francisco-based artist and the senior associate editor for KQED Arts & Culture. Recent projects include a two-person show at Oakland’s Royal NoneSuch Gallery and Space Travel Sci-Fi Style, a performative lecture at the Exploratorium. Her work has been featured in the San Francisco Arts Commission’s public art program, and in group shows at Friends Indeed, San Francisco; Cheymore Gallery, Tuxedo Park; Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco; and Hunter East Harlem Gallery; New York. She has attended residencies at Skowhegan, ACRE and the Vermont Studio Center. She watches a lot of science fiction, which she reviews in the semi-regular publication Sci-Fi Sundays. In 2019 she received the Dorothea & Leo Rabkin Foundation grant for arts journalism.

For more information, please contact the gallery at info@romeryounggallery.com or 415.550.7483.