There is a tension that runs throughout my artwork between acknowledging discordance  and wanting to create cohesion.  In this body of work I am exploring both personal and cultural experiences with technology.   The cell phone acts as a warping mirror where reflections come back bent and distorted. Two faces incrementally twist together.  They merge into an apex of self-absorption, and gradually begin to separate.  The cell phones repeat as fractals, multiplying the number of reflections, while simultaneously simplifying the content.

On top of this surface, I use lines to create a more predictable layer of pattern. We all take what we know and try to organize it into categories that will help us make sense of future encounters. Memory, background knowledge, and preconceptions influence how we see. When we “see,”  our brains fill in far more prior information than what we get from our eyes. We assimilate the new by linking it to what we already know.  The second part of this show is more focused on geometry as a representation of existing mental structures.  The spiral is one of humanity’s oldest universal symbols representing growth and expansion.

True growth involves an interplay between prediction and correction.  When we acknowledge irregularities and try to make room for them, our mental structures shift to accommodate the new information.  It is a messy, sometimes uncomfortable process, but that is what learning looks like.

MORE ABOUT AMY AND HER WORKS

"I just feel like there's a big cloud off in the distance, looming large."
"Well, Hannah, why don't you invite the cloud in?"

Invite the Cloud In explores the difficult act of turning toward what feels overwhelming. Created during a period of profound personal change, these layered abstract works emerge from an ongoing process of grief, loss, and reorientation. The end of a significant relationship becomes not only a present rupture, but an opening into older landscapes of attachment, memory, and survival.

Working with transparent materials suspended in layers, along with monochromatic ink and paint, Theiss builds abstract visuals that shift as the viewer moves. Forms appear and dissolve, obscuring and revealing one another. The works inhabit a space of uncertainty, where clarity and confusion, presence and absence, coexist.

Rather than offering resolution, Invite the Cloud In seeks to give form to emotional landscapes that resist articulation. Through scale, transparency, and accumulation, the work invites viewers into states of unease and recognition, where what feels unnameable is briefly made visible.

MORE ABOUT HANNAH'S WORKS

The five works in this show are from a series of watercolors I made during my second semester of graduate school, spring 1974. These works were pivotal. They recollected some of my previous representational works and some of the art I had long admired, like William Harnett’s 19th-century trompe l’oeil paintings of card racks and old doors, and Giorgio Morandi’s lively, existential still lifes of humble crockery. 

They were also informed by art I encountered on monthly trips to New York and frequent hops across the street from the Yale Art Gallery, where Marcel Duchamp’s Tu ‘m, and Jasper Johns’ White Flag resided. 

White Flag left a particularly deep impression on me. I was thinking of its unity as object and image when I painted the fields of four of these paintings. This interest in ambiguous geometric forms and spaces has extended to my current work.

MORE ABOUT MICHAEL'S WORKS