Bas Fisher Invitational presented the first solo show of works by Kathleen Hudspeth, “You Were Always there with Us.” The works are from her MFA thesis exhibition.

The works use a language of visual symbology to refer to dominant and marginalized groups within the context of both art history and impossible situations. Knives, bouquets, logs, flies and drips stand for actions, people and systems simultaneously. The work is made from a feminist perspective, and re-imagines the narrative of the white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy at an individual, intimate scale.The culture of printmaking is an important influence on the works in this exhibition. Though many of the works are prints, none is part of an identical edition; Hudspeth exploits the possibilities of the multiple in such a way as to rephrase and reframe visual statements in order to better build an internal language of meaning. Engraving, lithography, mezzotint, etching and silkscreen are used together with collage to both evoke and undermine art-historical traditions. (gallery notes)

The artist’s recurrent symbols used in the works: still-life with bell shaped flowers, flies, a knife, a wood log, areas that look like paint oozing down the front of the work, and text “fun” and “sublime.”

Kathleen Hudspeth’s combination of exquisite mark making, brutal, yet subtle forces of gouging copper… Even though some of the images (fly) may not be anatomically correct, the delicate (variegation or variations) of link thickness and each of those lines filled with rich black ink envelopes the paper’s surface as does the muted colors used in highlighting certain features.

Alfredo Triff asks, “Can images convey complex associations? The question makes sense because of recent charges that contemporary criticism is more about the theory than it is about the art.” Triff continues, “Hudspeth adds elements to (as she puts it in her note to the exhibit) “build an internal language of meaning”. Obviously, a pictorial language needs a pictorial convention into which it’s woven. For the time being let’s play along the symbolic word/image===>convention. Flowers? Feminine (by the way, who decides the conventions?) The knife. How about phallic power? (a privileged signifier)”

Triff questioned review is becoming too psychological however, symbolic relationships of objects is so idiosyncratic as to be indeterminate for the most part. Can not the objects/symbols also function as pure shape with a multiplicity of textures, gradients and edges? In other words, to make a knife, as it were, an abstract object shape. It is possible.

And, the knife as phallic power? Is that what women are doing in the kitchen when cooking, wielding their masculine selves over the hot stove? Of course, Triff didn’t imply that by what he wrote but, that’s a possibility coming out of the kitchen where there are knives, plenty of them, too.

On a personal note, my preferences are the works with flies because of all the interesting shapes and surfaces their bodies have. Seeing this one insect has most people in the US start acting a little bit uneasy. Maybe, that’s what’s happening here, we’re a little bit uneasy but, not thrown into a tizzie as so much work seems to attempt. Of course, everybody has different spaces within which they work and Ms. Huspeth has found a space that works for her and us.

The BFI is an artist run alternative art space, located in the Buena Vista Building in Miami’s Design District. It was founded in July 2004 by artists Hernan Bas and Naomi Fisher. The space is currently run by Naomi Fisher, Jim Drain, Kathryn Marks, and Agatha Wara.

Bas Fisher Invitational 180 NE 39th Street, suite 210 Miami, FL 33137