Jen Hitchings
Lunacy
Jen Hitchings
October 25 - December 9, 2024
Gaa New York
Gaa is pleased to present Lunacy, a solo exhibition of paintings and watercolors by LA-based artist Jen Hitchings. Conceptualized and largely created during her six-week residency at Colstoun Arts, hosted on the grounds of a nine-hundred-year-old family-owned estate in the Scottish countryside, this recent body of work explores supernatural phenomena and aspects of the feminine divine across shared cultures, mythologies, and histories. Lunacy marks Hitchings’ inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery.
This expansive exhibition continues Hitchings’ exploration of the intangible relationships humans have between one another, as well as society’s relationship to the earth and the cosmos. Specifically, these works illustrate Hitchings’ internal investigation of societal belief systems, focusing primarily on the historic (created) condition of hysteria and the regression of this concept into the unsubstantiated perception of women as being “crazy”, or not in control of their mental, physical, and emotional states. Proportionately catalyzed by personal events and experiences, in addition to time spent researching folklore, mythology, symbols, and language, these works bring into question methodologies – and, effectively, pitfalls – of communication across history.
Woven into Hitchings’ painted compositions is her interest in syncretized narratives dominated by tropes of female seduction, deception, betrayal, and deviance. These notions exist across Greek and Roman mythology as well as Celtic and Norse mythology, and persist in modern cultures. Much of Hitchings’ individual journey has centered upon the investigation of the extreme actions directed towards women during moments of liberation – whether it be personal, professional, or sexual. The dichotomy between the societal and medical treatment of women exhibiting characteristics of witchcraft or hysteria serves as the crux of Hitchings’ desire to investigate such phenomena. Such beliefs are exemplified through the controversy of “female hysteria” during the Victorian era: “hysteria”, derived from the Greek word hystera, meaning “womb”, historically defined a plethora of conditions – ranging from fatigue and sickness to anxiety and schizophrenia – uniquely attributed to the “wandering womb” within a woman’s body, and thus precluding men from such a diagnosis. Women demonstrating hysteria received treatment through “hysterical paroxysm”, the antiquated term for a medically-induced orgasm, effectively utilizing pleasure as a means for relief (or release).
In this most recent body of work, Hitchings further explores the existence of such severe dualities across various religious and cultural belief systems, from yin and yang in Chinese philosophy to the savior and the devil within many monotheistic religions. Each painting or series in Lunacy presents a cyclical or dualistic landscape setting, subtly integrating symbolic numerology, sequencing, and sacred geometries into the composition. Vivid compositions – with color palettes chosen to elicit specific emotions, or signify a particular temperature, season, or time of day – contain reflections, patterns, cascades, and tangents evocative of the natural world and the human psyche. Formations suggestive of phalluses, vulvas, breasts, facial features, hair, or flowing bodily fluids subliminally surface within mountain ranges, crevices, waterfalls, or crescent moons.
Notably, curvilinear patterns, such as meandering lines and spirals, recur within these imagined environments. Hitchings’ repeated inclusion of these motifs subtly alludes to the contemporary notion of “spiraling”, inferring a loss of control over one’s mental or emotional stability. The title of the exhibition underscores this theme of distress or dysfunction, with its origins stemming from a historic classification of intermittent insanity triggered by the changing lunar cycles, which also were erroneously linked to the female menstrual cycle for centuries.
Hitchings seeks to combine three metaphysical spaces explored within her artistic practice – the furthest frontier being the material world of the earth and the cosmos, the middle ground being the physical body, and the closest sphere being the psyche – into one visual plane. Her paintings serve as a portal into further inquiry, compelling the viewer to consider the esoteric, intangible, and mystical elements of life and offering an infinite, cyclical dance of consciousness, carving a pathway upon which one might seek truth and pursue unachievable desire to make meaning of existence.
Jen Hitchings (b. 1988, New Jersey, USA) is a Burbank-based artist whose work depicts surreal, natural environs in monochromatic color and graphic quality. Her work investigates the tenuous relationship between humankind and nature, and in recent years, she has embarked on a self-reflective investigation of the psyche, relationships, erotic desire, and cosmic forces.
Hitchings holds a BFA in Painting & Drawing from SUNY Purchase College, a Certificate of Completion of Sotheby’s online certificate Art as a Global Business, and a certificate in Small Business & Entrepreneurship from CUNY Hunter College. She has had solo shows at Gaa, New York, NY; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK, among others. Recent group exhibitions have taken place at Gaa, New York, NY; Mother Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, LA; Ana Mas Projects, Barcelona, Spain; Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA; Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; Newark International Liberty Airport, Newark, NJ; and Cindy Rucker, Pierogi, and Ideal Glass in New York, NY. In 2023, she was commissioned by Mailchimp to produce a 9 x 21’ indoor permanent office mural in Atlanta, GA. She received a Queens Council on the Arts’ New Works Grant in 2018. Between 2011–2020, Hitchings co-directed Transmitter and Associated Gallery and managed several contemporary and secondary market art galleries in NYC. She founded the art consulting agency Studio Associate in 2019 and was Director of Career Services at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) from 2022-2024.