Moving From and For

Always arriving at abstraction through visceral embodiment, Erica Mahinay extends her practice with a new series of oil paintings that distills her obsession with transparency through layered gesture. Traditional techniques of underpainting and glazing creates optical color— Titanium white layered over burnt sienna appears pink or layered over umber appears blue— engaging the viewer’s eye and nervous system and encouraging a different physiological sensation than direct color. Though the surface and material are more homogenized than her previous silk paintings, with their stitched boundaries, wrinkles and puckers, she builds on her materially driven language to utilize color in participatory revel.

The gestural marks, primarily with her hand or through pours of color smeared and wiped away recall Helen Frankenthaler or Carolee Scneemann. Mahinay both leans upon on and departs from a history of artists using their bodies to make marks in acts of freedom, protest, or catharsis. Her approach complicates the at-once-ness of gestural abstraction in embrace of slowing and responding to each works’ idiosyncratic history. Underpainting portions remain as a ghostly underlying presence with responsive layers of direct color floating or weaving through to varying degrees of coverage. She he uses the underpainting as a technique that traditionally create the premise for illusionistic space by establishing lights and darks or the nuances of skin-tone. This ignition point lays a foundation for gestural articulation, creating depth for material and surface interactions to materialize through additive and subtractive methods. Each painting in the exhibition begins with the same foundational palette, but through a responsive, exploratory process, becomes dramatically distinct. Groping and slipping into being, these tactile and spatial abstractions employ familiarity, becoming almost legible, while celebrating surprise and the unknown.

Mahinay reroots her practice in these dynamic and playfully emergent paintings while continuing a core thread of her practice. Image is edited and reworked, ultimately embodying the slipperiness of perception and image, “self”, or identity as a creative act that is unfixed and only strengthened, by vulnerability, responsiveness, and flexibility. Now, translating her process of editing and reworking through paint, she continues to find parallels between making art and formulating “self” as perpetually evolving from that which we came and for that which we seek to embrace.