In Lieu is pleased to present Hum of Virtue, an exhibition of new paintings by Katja Farin. This mark’s the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

 

Skies tilted, walls slipped, floorboards unbolted, and peaks leveled. Somehow the six am  raising was slept through, and the clamor of construction lingers only in humidity. We find  ourselves picking up these rooms with sweaty fingers as we might in a novelty shop, trying to  shake the beetle in its resin, in simultaneous attempt to resuscitate and prove our strength. But  again, heat and sunshine negate. All that is heard are our clicking wrists, moving the room but  never its dwellers.  

As temperatures rise, raucous hues and patterns preserve the casts of figures and furniture. To each other they are not muted, but an audience cannot increase volume for juvenile satisfaction. This want, however, hums as insects swarm and crouch in the heatwave. Bodies replicate the invertebrates’ gestures in envy of knowing efficient body regulation, so they dully gaze toward their counterparts as furtive conservation measures. This stress of self-preservation and simultaneous desire to liquify the resin sort the timbre of the paintings. Through static  multiples, delivered with the flitting species, a pattern’s crinkle, or zipping airbrush, sound  becomes texture. That is, we do not hear the paintings through reverberation, i.e, the violent  quake of the tchotchke, but through surface application. Texture hums to nullify soliloquy, and  our beetles are left floating in an aural architecture, one in which they must, despite deceit,  constantly tread.  

Buoyed by texture and kept afloat by possession, these paintings demand touch. They will not be cooled off, heat will surge, and humming will swell an octave. Sweaty fingers might act even virtuously, but irreverence will blister and callus in clandestine defense.  

-Mona Colette Salomon Welch