MICHELLE HINEBROOK - Enveloped Catalogue Essay

Written by Howie Kahn “I came across these fruit-meshes—the kind pears are wrapped in when you get them as gifts—and I was fascinated with how they stretched and created different forms. I stapled bunches to the wall, studied how they moved. I noticed these semi-permeable barriers were everywhere: objects with structure that you could also pass through visually. Orange plastic construction fences had those flexible properties and I started taking them. I started shopping for every grid I could get. Air filters. Screens. Grates. Fishing nets. I got a hammock and studied how it held the body, contoured the flesh, interfaced with weight and light. I got my body mapped in an MRI tube. I asked doctors for images of brain scans and pathology patterns—cells gathered in odd clusters—and started thinking about the space between spaces, the interior of the smallest particles possible.” Michelle Hinebrook in conversation. Brooklyn, New York, September 1, 2007. Michelle Hinebrook wears a hazmat suit when she paints. She puts on a gas mask and a white head-covering that looks like a giant sock. It keeps her medium out of her hair; separates the artist from the enamel she’s spraying—mist from a pencil-shaped gun. Even in process, Hinebrook’s work confronts barriers that are not merely walls but points of connection: where the world brushes the skin directly, where particles as fine as emotion and thought (not to mention the vaporous paint itself) face acceptance or resistance, where life beyond the body bumps right up against it. Appropriately, connection emanates from tension, whose very definition implies stretching, though not necessarily that to which we commonly refer to as stress. Tension, in its essence, deals with opposing forces, and such opposition must not always be experienced negatively. Hinebrook uses tension to encourage joining, to actualize resolution. It is no coincidence that in her work, tension is represented by what looks like a starburst—a spark of pure light. On a wooden ground, say four feet square, she intuitively draws with chalk or hair-thin tape. Where the lines intersect, quarter-inch nails are hammered in. She torques her mesh—plucked from her collection of scavenged and bought semi-permeables—around those nails, which become as structurally significant as bone. They give the mesh skeletal reinforcement. Next, Hinebrook manipulates the netting, loosening it, pulling it tight. She uses those biomedical images as resources. Once the material is set, she loads her gun, paints into the grid from different angles to provide dimension. The impression, after she removes the nails and the mesh, can be one of undulation, subcutaneous swelling, or data collected in real-time; brain waves, meditations, and electronic memories; restrained flesh and mapped flesh; flesh lit up from the inside, set unmistakably in motion by the thrill of tactile sensation. Viewing becomes intimate. Colors coalesce and contrast with an Albersian rhythm. Hinebrook’s surfaces, those luscious layers of enamel, pull you close, then closer. You don’t merely look at the work, you slip into it. Pushing beyond the optical conceits of Julian Stanczak and Bridget Riley, Hinebrook mines hard physical content to challenge notions of interior and depth: How deep does experience go? How far into experience are you willing to go? How far must you go? Though bound to minimalism through geometry, Hinebrook’s networks evince the conceptual heft of works by information-saturationists like Chuck Close and Fred Tomaselli. The body here is not as evident, but only because the artist has taken you inside of it, all the while asking: How does knowledge break down into fractions and smaller fractions? What exists at the center of things? How do we approach that place, gather its lessons, and emerge with an enhanced and cyclical understanding, first of what’s inside, then of what surrounds us? The exchange in each painting is between interior and exterior, micro and macro, recognition and mystery. The body and the body’s experience. Divisions are presented as connections. Every territory borders another, which borders another. No two spaces are unrelated. Through composition, Hinebrook suggests that everything responds to everything; inevitably, the grid holds us all. Within its lines, we become organized, accessible, explorable if not explainable.