Chris Hood “Falling Through Flatland”

Lyles & King (21 Catherine St.)

[Image: Chris Hood "Phantom Limb" (2021) Alkyd on canvas, 78 x 64 in.]

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Lyles & King presents Falling Through Flatland, Chris Hood’s third solo exhibition.

Chris Hood’s paintings embody a sense of alluring familiarity. In his layered compositions, Hood moves swiftly between swirling abstraction, ambiguous landscapes, and figuration, building environments under, over, and through the canvas’s surface—not unlike the subconscious images bubbling to the surface of consciousness in a dream.

The paintings in Falling Through Flatland contain vignettes, or portals, into generic landscapes, as well as recurring glyphs of holes, sparks, flashes, and cave-like formations. The imagery is frequently fractured and repeated as if attempting to capture the mnemonic sensations of deja vu and its counterpart amnesia through multiplicity and iteration. Hood’s archetypal subject matter is used to bring forth a sense of uncanniness and otherness with what is deeply familiar. This emotional current runs through the exhibition, manifesting as visual concerns with the emotional affect of memory, time, alienation, and recollection.

Formally, Hood’s images become subsumed, distant, familiar; yet tangibly unplaceable. Figures in a Landscape depicts two skeletons, doubled, eternally embraced. Romance travels from life, into death, representing both emergence and decay—they are fractured, yet bound in Hood’s kaleidoscopic world. Similarly, in Supercollider, Hood combines natural imagery with that from VR, confusing the boundaries between the real and the unreal. Neither dimension takes precedence, speaking to the blurry overlaps of our contemporary existence.

Hood’s desire towards searching, touching, and traversing through space and dimensions can be seen in All Futures in which a pixelated figure exists between legibility and abstraction. The figure, perhaps a caveman emerging from darkness, a traveler unsure of their direction, or shaman searching for enlightenment. Amongst the dioramas of the landscapes and abstract fields in other paintings, this person emerges, seeking the unknown. Neither past nor future, it is unclear if they are fading away or fading into existence. These moments create a palpable sense of both emergence and degradation simultaneously.

Like involuntary memories, the images from Hood’s stained, beguiling surfaces create an alluring atmosphere in which familiarity dances with the unexpected. Echoes of the body flicker amongst sunsets and fields, indeterminate enough to project lived experience onto, and recognizable enough to procure uncanny affect.

Chris Hood (b. 1984, Atlanta, GA) has exhibited at The Museum of Museums, Seattle, US; Zuckerman Museum of Art, Atlanta, US; Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles, US; Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; CANADA, New York, US; Eduardo Secci, Florence, IT; The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; Ceysson & Bénétière, Paris, FR; and Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Geneva, CH; among many others. He received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010. Hood lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.