NYAB Event - Mary Henderson "Forces"

Mary Henderson "Forces"

This event has ended.
At Lyons Wier Ortt Gallery
Media: Painting, Photography

Mary Henderson’s latest exhibition, “Forces”, continues the artist’s hyper-real painting style that documents a particular American subculture or experience. In her previous exhibition, “Right Clique”, Ms. Henderson gathered inspiration from photo-sharing websites that celebrated rite-of-passage images of the elite prep-school experience. As a participant in this world, she was able to distill her commentary to a moment of realization within the context of her subjects, creating images that were captivating yet confounding.
With “Forces”, Henderson continues to draw from personal experience through her brother, a Commander in the U.S. Navy, who served in Iraq from February to August 2007. During his deployment, she sought information about her brother by visiting public web portals where service members posted information and images about the war as well as their day-to-day activities.
During this time, Henderson became fascinated with images that depicted soldiers in uniform but in non-combat settings. She wanted to zero in on moments of ‘down time’, moments that seemed suffused with an odd combination of boredom, bravado, and anxiety. Her hope while rendering these images as paintings was to sharpen the complexities of their emotional tone, to capture their poignancy, and create something iconic and remote.