up next: Cloud Oakes

September 25th - October 18th

The Art Hive invites the Prescott community to engage with Cloud Oakes in a solo show, Exquisite Corpse, curated by Alina Pellicer. The term, Exquisite Corpse comes from the historical term used to describe a drawing game in which each participant takes turns writing or drawing on a sheet of paper, folding it to conceal his or her contribution, and then passing it to the next player for a further contribution. The game gained popularity in artistic circles during the 1920s when it was adopted as a technique by artists of the Surrealist movement to generate collaborative compositions.

Cloud uses her love of self reflection and connection to community in her surrealist figurative work. Through various compositions and a unique encaustic painting technique, she captures the uncanny emotions in which we can relate. The painting process is rooted in the study of the human form as a conduit for connection to a deeper part of self and with others. The use of hot wax on a birch wood panel allows for her figures to take on an other worldly appearance that invite the viewer to pause and see human expressions from a new perspective. Many of her pieces begin as a charcoal drawing which is transposed to a wood panel and then layered with hot wax and oil paint to create semi-transparent layers of form and texture. The effect is meant to blend what we may feel with what is outwardly seen. 

Cloud’s layered process is a private version of the parlor game: charcoal lays down the first contribution, then each coat of wax partially conceals it—like the fold in Exquisite Corpse—before oil paint responds to a form it can only half-see. The final semi-transparency is the “unfolding”: a figure built from stages that didn’t fully see each other, surfacing an uncanny feeling the same way the game surfaces a body no single player intended. Where the Surrealists passed the paper hand to hand, Cloud passes the panel material to material—letting concealment and partial sight do the work of blending what’s felt with what’s shown. - Alina Pellicer, curator 

“I approach a new work with an emotion that I need to express. This allows my work to represent a personal evolution of self discovery, and in turn, a representation of the humanistic evolution of discovery” - Cloud Oakes

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