LOIE HOLLOWELL: OVERVIEW EFFECT
Pace is pleased to present Overview Effect, an exhibition of new paintings by Loie Hollowell, at its Los Angeles gallery.
November 9, 2024 – January 18, 2025
Her upcoming exhibition in LA takes its title from what astronauts describe as the “overview effect”—the experience of seeing Earth from space. From that vantage point, the planet becomes a unified whole without borders or boundaries, a single system of which humanity is a tiny part.
In her new Overview Effect paintings, Hollowell gives viewers a bold first impression: searing our retinas with the force of bright color, extreme lighting, symmetry, and strong geometries that take on larger-than-life proportions. Stare for a while, and you will feel the paintings’ lasting effects as afterimages linger over your field of vision and leave a psychic mark. The limited palette in this body of work, based on primary colors and their combinations, suggests something basic and elemental floating in the cosmic soup.
But looking longer and closer, something else happens—a tension between strict compositional order and localized mark-making, between overall tightness and areas of looseness, between mathematical precision and hand-painted, jumbled chaos. The dynamic between these contradictory aspects is complex, with stability containing instability, symmetry and geometry emerging from entropy. This rapport between the overview effect and the works’ up-close details depends on proximity. What appear from a distance as luminous orbs, celestial bodies, and blended colors shift into new focus as tangles of swirling, frenetic lines that imply hidden dimensions zip through our own frequencies and pass undetected through this field of existence.
The Overview Effect paintings depict two identically sized orbs stacked vertically with concentric ripples that intersect to form a horizontal mandorla. Here, Hollowell uses abstraction to capture the brief moments and breaks between contractions during childbirth, which can be a simultaneously out-of-body experience and a thoroughly visceral, embodied one. In each of these paintings, one orb bulges out while the other is a cavity—they could nest inside one another, like a hand or mouth cupped over a breast or like a child filling a pregnant mother’s belly.