Jessie Henson: In The Project Room: See What the Sun Thinks

Opening Thursday, June 22 6-8pm

New York-based artist Jessie Henson will make her Broadway debut with See What the Sun Thinks, an exhibition of new works in our Project Room.

Working with an industrial sewing machine and gold leaf on paper, Henson approaches her abstractions with as much muscle as grace. As the tightly nestled and brightly colored thread accretes across the surface in clusters, the paper buckles and contorts adding a sculptural dimension that is echoed by the reflectivity of the metallic leafing.

Henson is a subtly clever colorist as well, at times situating slight tonal variances side by side or leaving considerable swaths of the paper unsewn. A group of works using primarily black thread on black paper reinforce this disciplined aspect of her work, encouraging a totalizing, topographical effect.

Taken together, this body of work serves as a concise introduction to Henson’s practice and her particular inversion of painterly abstraction—one that is refracted through a prism of both craft and industrial manufacture.