Jolene Lai returns to Thinkspace Projects with a new collection of eerie paintings. The aptly named “The Beautiful Haunting,” starting on Sept. 14, brings her sensibility, seemingly informed by pop mediums and children’s stories to the gallery walls. The painter has a rare ability to evoke the same sense of mystery and danger in settings absent of human occupants. Lai was last featured on our website here.
“I want to construct a plane where what is relatable and comforting to us, comes to merge with emotions of unfamiliarity and unsettlement,” she says. “The collection largely draws influences from popular film culture and children fiction books that I have grown up watching, reading and have come to love. Naming a few that I have referenced are films such as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the original TV series The Twilight Zone and novels like Adventures of the Wishing Chair by Enid Blyton. I particularly wanted to focus on extracting interesting key characters and elements from each story that many have come to recognize as household names, and challenge myself to reiterate them by misplacing them in urban landscapes and comfortable nooks that I have handpicked from actual documentations of my explorations of the neighborhoods I have visited.”
Find more on Thinkspace’s site and Lai’s own page.
The paintings of Jean Paul Langlois blend memories of 1970s sci-fi and Westerns of his youth, while also exploring the artist’s connection to his own native and non-native roots. Within his Old West scenes, you may also see a character from “Planet of the Apes” or references to Saturday morning cartoons. His "Origin Stories" series, in particular, re-imagines "mundane family stories and re-interpreting them through a cinematic lens."
Christian Vincent’s paintings carry whimsy and melancholy, the artist playing with light and perspective in scenes from the everyday. Surrealism is typical in Vincent’s work, yet at varying degrees. The overall essence plays into the function of memory and how we fill in details with the perspectives of both then and now.
Aaron Marshall
Using acrylics, black gesso, gold leaf, and wood,