Kristin Hough: No Time for Tears

Kristin Hough, Time Out for Tears at Whitney Library, Las Vegas

By D.K. Sole

I saw a few of these paintings (was it four?) in a group show organized by Rogers Art Loft at the end of 2020. Now there was a mass of them together, patterning the gallery at the Whitney Library with blocks of faces. All of the paintings depicted the same thing, a portrait of a woman, a contestant in a reality show, The Bachelor, or one of its spinoffs. The canvas imitated the horizontal rectangle of a TV screen, but (it seemed to me?) smaller, with the edges cropped off, pulling me closer to the woman’s face and telling me that the buffer of space that protected her on TV had been diminished. Was this intimacy? No, because Hough had included some reminders that I was seeing this woman through the double-distancing artifice of both a canvas and a digital screen. The cropping was large enough to include glimpses of on-screen text (“Up next: Bachelor in Paradise”) and closed captioning that gave me speech (“Don’t tell me you get what it’s like”) and noises (“[sniffles]”). They reminded me that paintings make me deaf. I stare into these conversations without hearing them. The women were breaking down in tears.

They cried in different ways: some with their palms over their eyes, some with two streams running down their cheeks, others leaning against their hands. The style Hough had chosen for the series was rough and ugly: the browns under their shadowed cheekbones were scratchy dirt, the hair was stiff and streaky, the fingers over the face of the woman who said “I don’t know what to do” were boneless paper strips. The large mass of similar emotions warned me away from personal identification. Misery had become a pattern, a decoration, sketched into place. I learned to anticipate it. I didn’t believe that I was being asked to pick out a woman and empathize with her, or even examine her all that closely. The fact that she was on a TV show told me that the sadness had already been mediated, listened to, framed against a studio backdrop, judged by an editor, and placed in a narrative to which I did not have access. The artist had extended that act of choosing into the series. If the editor, the director, or the artist hadn’t wanted this image to exist then I wouldn’t be looking at it now. Each woman had gone through two different selection processes with different purposes, one that proceeded chronologically towards a conclusion (the bachelor chose somebody) and one that kept its narrative inside a closed circle, each image a repetition of the one before and the one after.

I had heard enough about The Bachelor to feel as if I knew what had happened before each woman arrived at her moment. Another contestant had been bitchy to her or someone had accused her of something: she had had a setback in the narrow competition for the bachelor’s attention. At the same time I realized it was a phantom confidence. I’ve never watched any of the shows.

Where was the bachelor himself? Where was the cause, the treasure, the prize, the doom, the catharsis? The source of the sadness was sometimes him (“Why do men think they can treat women like this?” said one speech caption), sometimes someone else (“Your whole point in this was just to discredit me”) and sometimes a nebulous whatever (“I don’t know what to do”). There was no moment of euphoria when everything went right. I circled the room and there was no ending. Left without a punchline, I was free to interpret the series in a number of directions, depending on the way my mind wanted to go. I thought of the earlier body of work that Hough had exhibited in one of the Las Vegas library system galleries, the Pinewood Vortex show with Faith Sponsler in the first half of 2021. Here, again, I was invited to guess at the existence of a motivating factor but I couldn’t see it. What had pulled the rope into the river at the mysterious Vortex? What had made this woman cry? Who had discredited who else by getting involved in “this,” whatever this was? The women in these portraits were peripheral actors, driven by a force. Where was the force?

Kristin Hough, Time Out for Tears at Whitney Library, 5175 E Tropicana Ave, Las Vegas, NV 89122
October 26, 2021 - January 11, 2022

Published by Wendy Kveck on January 6, 2022