Kristen Hatgi Sink: “A Tented Sky” – Notions of Youth, Fragility and Beauty

Kristen Hatgi Sink was born in 1984 in Denver, Colorado, where she currently lives and works. She earned a BFA at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work has been exhibited at venues across the country and abroad, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Japanese Paper Museum Ino, and Cohju Contemporary Art.

USA – 

Art & Culture feature – This latest series of photographic works marks a distinct evolution in Hatgi Sink’s work. Both sumptuous and disruptive her images indulge in excess while indicating that not all is well in paradise.  Referring to a line by the lyric poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Tented Sky presents a captive world, where femininity and nature are caught in a cycle of desire.

The stage is set to resemble familiar still life depictions of youth, fragility and beauty. However the objects of attraction find themselves struggling against their roles in this exploitative fantasy. Familiar metaphors comparing supplicated feminine sexuality and a natural commodities, such as ripe fruit, fresh meat and raw honey are presented in such suffocating abundance that the expected stoicism of the image’s subjects is shaken. Jarred into awareness of their own implicated position, the women in Hatgi Sink’s images express various stages of reaction within a voyeuristic frame they cannot seem to escape.

As in the poem Renascence from which the title is drawn, within Hatgi Sink’s A Tented Sky, the protagonists wrestle with their own awakening. Some of the models attempt to dismantle the signs surrounding them, tearing, ripping and crushing these natural objects controlling their image. Others seem to seek escape through darker self inflicted means. However, like Millay’s first person narrator, a number of these young women appear to eventually embrace or succumb to their fate, consumed by a male-dominated fantasy. Perhaps as Eve eating the apple, newfound awareness has also brought with it self-consciousness. After the first bite there is clearly no return to subjugated ignorance, nor a direct path towards liberation. The resulting ambivalence of this provocative collection of images may prove the most unsettling vision of all.

 

Related Posts

Christine Maxfield: A Magnet for Hilarious Predicaments

U.S.A. – Christine Maxfield is an international travel writer and photojournalist who quit her job as a magazine editor in …

Light in Babylon -Rebuilding Babel

Turkey – Light in Babylon, a world music band from Istanbul was formed in 2009. With two albums to their …

Jeff Frost : ‘If you figure me out, call me!’

U.S.A. – In the ghostly Mojave Desert of Southern California, dead trees don’t stay dead for long. American artist Jeff …

Perspective Interchange – Nick Gentry

England – British artist Nick Gentry is best known for his floppy disk paintings and film-negative artworks. He is keen …

Marc Codsi: The Art of Surrender

Lebanon – Wildly defiant of restrictive categorization, Marc Codsi has been indispensable in the proliferation and development of the fledgling …

Q: ‘It felt like love’

India –  Known for testing definitions and boundaries, Q is a uniquely transitional director filmmaker. His most recent picture adapts …

Alyssa Monk’s Photo-Realistic Paintings

USA –  Monks‘s paintings have been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions including “Intimacy” at the Kunst Museum …

Adil and Vasundhara-‘Let’s not obsess over being more exotic than we actually are.’

India –  Emaho caught up with diabolical duo Adil & Vasundhara – Adil Manuel (Guitar) and Vasundhara Vidalur (Vocals), and …

Polly Penrose: “A Body of Work”

United Kingdom –  ‘A Body of Work’ by London based photographer Polly Penrose is a series of self portraits taken …