Loie Hollowell's 'Mother Tongue' Exhibition at Feuer/Mesler Explores Bodily Landscapes

Loie Hollowell presented new paintings at Feuer/Mesler from October 27 to December 18, 2016. The exhibition, titled 'Mother Tongue,' featured works from 2016 that blend bodily forms with natural landscapes. Located at 319 Grand Street, Second Floor in New York, the show included pieces like 'Looking at Clouds, Cactus and Sun,' which merges cloud and cactus imagery with human anatomy. Hollowell's canvases often incorporate shaped surfaces with rounded protrusions, creating illusions that blur physical sculpture and painted representation. Colors in the paintings—unnamable purples, reds, and yellows—evoke desert sunsets and internal light. Works such as 'Rise, Risen' depict a woman's torso superimposed with celestial elements, while 'Hung (Up)' suggests desert, orgasm, and internal organs simultaneously. The artist explores intimacy through visual poetry, examining relationships between self, body, nature, gender, time, sex, and space. Her imagery oscillates between micro and macro scales, as seen in 'Hung (Detail),' which could represent a single cell or a distant supernova. The paintings maintain narrative ambiguity through symmetry, form, and color divides, keeping viewers transfixed by metamorphosing forms.