Laura Hunt & Lillian Paige Walton

"The kind of show is made by squeezing."

-Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

The implication of tenderness boldly encouraged by this array of objects is unlike the gourmand’s fetish. Any meat seen falling off bone within the gallery will be allegorical, or rather, constitutional. (All solids melt!) Still, certain qualities conjured by the adjectival form remain. In the sense of: bruising, crushability, a soft approach to sexuality, and other vague emotional vectors.

If painting has been understood as a medium for expression, Laura Hunt and Lillian Paige Walton’s efforts here establish a vulnerability to perversions of method and form. As work, tenderness is a kind of twisted manipulation. A plasticine tease; a glove that fits far too well.

Hunt’s paintings are all 4x4-ft, shimmering oil and acrylic on 4-way-stretch red lamé fabric. Each a seductively drawn muleta veiling a conceptual dagger for the final third’s fatal blow.

Walton’s fuzzy sculptures need their simple plinths to “stand.” Because the figurative embraces they describe constellate psychological complexity without additional stability.

To consider tenderness in its more aggressive forms – the powdered enzyme that neuters a jellyfish sting, the public offer that results in an unfriendly takeover – is to rescue treachery from the sentimental.

-Kari Rittenbach