A private evening: Hilarie Mais’s ‘Night Simile’ at Downs & Ross
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The most striking aspect of Hilarie Mais’s gridded arrangements of wood, screws and oil paint, is that they are constructed freehand at night. I enjoyed hearing about this from curator Conor O’Shea shortly before Mais’s exhibition opened at Downs & Ross in Manhattan. O’Shea spoke of the speed with which Mais works and the way she employs the ‘memory palace’ technique, where one visualises familiar spaces to recall information.
For Mais, personal and subjective imagery is used to power the transmission of form into grids. The modularity of Mais’s work raises a paradox of universal inconsistency. A close inspection reveals the minutiae of everyday life in little nurtured glitches.
Memory and the past can be a grim place and it makes me consider the show’s ‘black and blue’ colour scheme as an adjective. If the askew grids are bruises on white walls, or minor traumas to put in order, they are also recesses where healing takes place. Their finish is a not-quite claggy satin paint that thickens in corners and at edges.
Small brushstrokes are visible, somewhere between crosshatching and feathering. They give the impression of dappled light, or eyes half-shut. Up close, the screw heads pulse: ‘X’ and ‘+’ and ‘-’ and ‘|’. The forms have a relationship to all those cubed and gridded works of the canon, and to constructivism, but their quaintness and odd veneer is what makes them feel present, and also by way of their relationship to a simultaneous show across town at Matthew Marks Gallery, where Vincent Fecteau painted one small sculpture, that had the presence of a scrambled miniature warship, to look like tiramisu.
I’m not sure whether anyone has written about Mais’s works being funny or kitsch before, it’s a fine thing to be! It occurs at the intersection of their seriousness and the crafty vernacular of their finish. The way they hang and lean in the space, and the attention they hold, appears more a result of the emotional weight they are imbued with, than how they look. Perhaps there are jokes in the transmission? Every grid is an elegy to daylight and straight lines. Chambers for the night or cages where light is a convict.
Though it isn’t visible in the exhibition documentation, Mais’s work casts a matrix of shadows, as if from an urge to cultivate the environment they stem from, their own private evening.
George Egerton-Warburton, New York City
Curated by Conor O’Shea, ‘Night Simile’ by Hilarie Mais was exhibited at Downs & Ross in New York from 9 December 2022 to 28 January 2023. Hilarie Mais and Conor O’Shea are also collectively showing their work in the exhibition ‘Linear Systems’ at Sutton Projects, Naarm/Melbourne, 4–25 February 2023.
