Kathy Hughes, "The Random Nature of Things"

Throughout July, Cole Pratt Gallery will exhibit a new series of mixed-media encaustic panels by New Orleans artist Kathy Hughes. Fourteen wooden panels comprise The Random Nature of Things—a show united by its cool color palette and soft surface textures. Hughes combines chaotic elements of the New Orleans cityscape with gestural drawings and geometric motifs to issue forth a seemingly “random” vision of our city. The exhibition continues through August 2, 2009.

With both mnemonic shapes and recognizable forms, Hughes tells a story of New Orleans. Houses, boats, and bicycles complement sidewalks, oak trees, and telephone wires, but the shapes are out of order; everything floats freely in space, defying gravity and discombobulating the eye. Yet even as the artist toys with entropy and disorder, her work is somehow grounded in inconspicuous horizontals and grids. Colors also play a role in Hughes’s struggle between chaos and stability as muted tones of lavender and blue calm the eye and evoke the silence of dawn.

The Random Nature of Things is surprising work from Hughes, the self-proclaimed “OCD” artist, who is most well-known at Cole Pratt Gallery for her orderly, mixed-media grid constructions. Hughes pushes herself to juxtapose a need for order with her appreciation of the unavoidable chaos that many New Orleanians have come to know well. An avid triathlete, Hughes finds inspiration from her daily, long-distance treks around town. She offsets fine-line sketches against the thick, surface level brushstrokes of encaustic, and she leads us to question how order and chaos coexist in everyday life.

To view this exhibition, go to our webpage at: www.coleprattgallery.com