I Can See It From Here Opening Reception

I Can See It From Here presents a new body of paintings by Hank Reavis, completed between 2024 and 2026. In partnership with Mini Mart City Park, this solo exhibition is staged in a reclaimed gas station in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood. The title of the exhibition refers to the displacement of memories from an individual’s past seen from the perspective of the present, and the distortion that attends their recollection. Reavis has been influenced in his recent work by the Northwest Mystic painters Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and Kenneth Callaghan, especially in the way that they studied nature by transposing the human spirit outwards onto the natural landscape of the area. This was carried out in the opposite expressive impulse to their ABEX peers in New York, or their Surrealist predecessors in Europe: rather than paraphrasing the inner life of the soul and mind by turning within, the Northwest Mystics projected outward through expressions of the human spirit in symbols found in nature around them. Other contemporary Northwest painters like Jean Nagai have also processed their home landscape in a pointillist language (because, indeed, Reavis’ pixels are a form of hard-edged pointillism). Whereas Nagai’s pointillism is more in line with the original Post-Impressionist visual ideas that took on new understandings of how light and color are mediated by the science of optics, highlighting the illusory nature of the image, Reavis’ mediation goes through the non-biological filter of processing by computer. Even any claim that this form of pixelation is less human, or more objective, is itself a misconception, as Reavis must painstakingly attempt, pixel by pixel, and always at the mercy of the accuracy of his own perception, to recreate and paint the hues of each cell by hand. In that way, Reavis’ pixel paintings share the meditative process of visual accretion seen in Nagai’s pointillist works. Other types of pixelation, or, rather, painting dealing with resolution, should be acknowledged here too, such as Gerhard Richter’s blur paintings of the 1980s. Though we might think of the "blur" as the opposite painterly gesture to Reavis’ pixelation, the two choices share an implication of the incoherency of memory.