Exhibition Walkthrough + Artist Talk: Hilary Pecis

Since her move to the Los Angeles area, the Southern Californian light has inspired Pecis’ work, suffusing each painting with a brightness and vivacity. Pecis captures portraits of people through both the interior and exterior spaces they occupy by using objects such as books, paintings, flowers, wallpapers, and furniture as signifiers for their human characteristics. She invites the viewer to step into intimate settings and environments through varied perspectives. The importance of perspective, the space in between, is paramount. The artist describes this in different ways: how both positive and negative space is negotiated on the canvas, as the space that we physically occupy, and how we overlap with our surroundings.

Many of the sites and scenes in Pecis’ work comes from her personal cache of photographs. Pecis’ photographs focus on certain details, which help to portray the feeling of a captured moment, and a translation of experience rather than simply a re-creation of a place. Her technique explores line, font, perspective, and color as stacks of books and vases of flowers sit on surfaces of rhythmic pattern. Familiar artworks by well-known artists dot the walls within her paintings, acknowledging those Pecis admires as well as the artist’s explorations as “a tourist trying out other marks.” Pecis’ paintings pull strength from their specific details, objects, allusions, and patterns, and the happy accidents that ensue. The artist’s process involves both skill and instinct as she adeptly opens a window onto her own experiences of Southern California, and gives us an entry point to consider the interconnectedness of the spaces and environments that we inhabit.