Hi-Fi
Natalie Conway’s small works are palm sized self-excivations. In ‘Hi-Fi’ they are presented loose, discrete, and available for tactile study. We believe these works act as self contained parcels of information, set together on a table they become files in a larger system. Each painting is a presentation of the momentum required by its creation, just as a stone exists as the evidence of geological movement. To investigate and appreciate these pieces as evidence of a process they must be studied as a geologist would study. When laid out together the pieces adopt a wider scope, a system can be sensed through hints of patterns and internal logic systems. Conway immediately invites the viewer to two distinct worlds. The first, a vast expanse of history, and pre-history, geological shifts forging crude ore. The second, the pre-conscious urge for play, children drawing loose barriers in the pavement to become castles, homes, it is the ability to force a life experience larger than ourselves. Conway can force even a worrywort pedant into his child’s eye. It is for this reason we have chosen to scatter the work, an open invitation to live in Conway’s child-id world. As you puzzle through these pieces as individuals held in hand, you are almost forced to collectivize them, through this we see the inevitability of Conway’s hand. These forms, and this texture must exist. In pure texture we begin to project anything we can, she has conjured an anomalic world; anonymous and filled with personality, it is natural and intuitive. Through an act of conduction her wood blanks are pressurized by a prehistorical force and in Conway’s hand a narrative is hammered out as a blacksmith would. This pressure transfigures wood and paint into freak geological phenomena, within them is held Altamira, the knick-knacks of old, icons of adoration. We begin to think of worry stones, handheld items that we attach personal value to, they live and breathe with us, and we begin to develop grander and grander ideas about its significance. The result we believe is a run-off of beauty, we have begun to see Conway's work everywhere we look, it is healthful and stimulating. Conway makes the mind active, asserts that the mind is healthier at work than at rest, and it is felt. -Jean Fuentes