Gina Beavers & Becky Kolsrud

JTT is pleased to present “Whispering Eye,” a two-person exhibition of paintings by Gina Beavers (b. 1974, Athens, Greece) and Becky Kolsrud (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA) that results from each of the artist’s unique and tireless obsessions with images of women. Kolsrud’s practice traditionally draws inspiration from commercial portraiture but also pulls from the artist’s memory, while Beaver’s source materials are more immediate, often approriated from social media.

For “Whispering Eye,” Beavers collected most of her source material from make-up artists’ Instagram accounts. In these sources, a woman’s face acts as a palette for a new technique or a new product. The face is then cropped, fragmented and rearranged, two left eyes are slotted side-by-side using applications for collaging photos. Such fragmentation is mimicked in Beavers’ paintings, which use thick layers of acrylic medium to give weight to the otherwise flattened image. The surfaces of her paintings are built to the extreme, creating an exaggerated relief - the depth of the painting makes the closely cropped images of heavily made-up eyes seem all the more packed in as they bulge out of their frames. The eyes, lips, and brows, initially intended to be viewed as a transient dis- play of beauty on social media, become grotesque in their physicality.

In Kolsrud’s “She Shed” paintings, security gates in contrasting blue and red obscure a huddle of cartoon-like eyes and features, staring out from behind the bars. The eyes are in pairs or part of a larger face, while others hover, disembodied. The term “She Shed” refers to a gardening shed that functions as a backyard retreat for women. Kolsrud’s versions appear to be hoarding women and cartoons alike, obfuscating the anonymous fig- ures whose bodies recede while their eyes persist. The gates are an ongoing theme in Kolsrud’s work, drawn from the facades of local salons in her neighborhood. Kolsrud draws the layered elements in her paintings from films by Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu who often shot their actors behind scrims or through slats typical to traditional Japanese architecture. Whether in competition with pieces of fabric, gates, or layered swaths of paint, Kolsrud’s figures exist with a passive awareness towards the barriers that obstruct and, ultimately, threaten to obliterate them.