What’s the relationship between an artist and her subject? In this film, artist Josephine Halvorson guides a video crew through an exhibition of her paintings—What Looks Back (2011)—at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan. Intimately exploring the detailed surfaces of her canvases like a roving eye, the camera evokes the conversational give-and-take between painter, object, and painting.
The subjects of Halvorson’s works are often singular, overlooked objects—masked-over windows, weathered walls, defunct mechanical devices—that she paints in their original environments. For Halvorson, who completes works on location in a single day-long session, choosing a subject to paint is an extremely personal and contingent process. As she describes it, “encountering something in the world, an object, allows me to realize a painting that I have somehow already apprehended, even though I’ve never made it.”
Traveling widely from her home in Brooklyn, Halvorson’s experiential process reaches outside the more common studio-based painting practices of New York City, taking her to train yards in Tennessee, a slaughterhouse in Iceland, and the English countryside.
