in lieu is pleased to announce Nues, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles artists Jessica Hang and Ian Stanton.
Centered within the gallery rests Hang’s Thinker in Repose, a queasily life-sized nude female body resting atop a glowy wooden coffin. The body, with its slightly askew proportions and glazed over eyes, resembles an anime character. Her positioning teases at demureness, one hand covers her right breast while the other graces her abdomen, seemingly reaching to cover more of herself. The Thinker is paralyzed in a state of permanent rumination.
Flanking Hang’s sculpture is a suite of Stanton’s paintings entitled Cloud / Composition. The works, painted in a monochromatic palette, straddle the divergent currents of representation and abstraction. With a concerted viewing, familiar topological and bodily forms reveal themselves. With as much effort on a second glance, they dissolve back into their compositional resonance.
The french word Nues is the feminine plural form of Nu - to be naked, nude, without clothes, or bare. Nues also has a secondary, older meaning; it is an antiquated expression for the clouds or skies. It is now found exclusively in idiomatic French phrases such as porter aux nues (translated literally, “to put someone in the clouds”) and tomber de nues (“to fall from the heavens”) — or, in English “to put someone on a pedestal” and “to fall out of one’s chair” (as from shock or surprise). But maybe les nues dans les nues would be more appropriate of a phrase in the context of this exhibition. Naked in the clouds? The clouds in the nudes?
