Nicola Tyson’s exhibition I am a teapot investigates the material qualities of paint while playfully exploring themes of the body. Her paintings are bold in size and color, and Tyson’s simplification of the human/animal form into a gestural language of mark-making feels just as confident as her choice of color palette and scale. Simultaneously, her brush strokes feel haphazard or coincidental, placing the figures in her paintings and us as the viewer in a precarious position, teetering between certainty and vulnerability. This in-between space that Tyson creates, and that we and her characters are left in, extends past mere preoccupations with the painted surface and moves into a realm where topics of bodily ambiguity unravel: Tyson approaches this topic with a genuine humor, making the images — although elaborate in their dualistic nature of being intentional yet incidental — easy to digest. In Their Dog, an image of a conjoined couple enveloping their dog rests atop a vibrant, red background. The couple’s facial features are simple yet effective: with two holes for eyes and a half-circle for the mouth, Tyson intentionally carves the rest of the figure’s form around these negative spaces to reveal the underpainting. Excluding the simplified yet distinct facial features, Tyson removes any indication of the figures’ genders. The interplay between clarity and ambiguity – persistence and restraint – sums up the complex quality of the show itself.
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