Blair Saxon-Hill is finding peace in a still-life in a time of chaos. I don’t know if that has always been the case, but what Saxon-Hill has done over the last 6 years is find a path forward amongst turmoil and constant unrest. The work angles itself as an olive branch to some form of sanity, or an attempt at finding something open and calm, while the world falls apart around her.
For Peace Piece, on view at Shrine, Saxon-Hill shows the meditation of not only finding flowers, going to markets and collecting, but also a conversation of her place in art history. There was a portion of the release on the show that I found fascinating: “Painting from life engages a different part of the artist’s brain than when working solely from her imagination.” Both are escapes, but this particular method has the artist focusing on something alive and outside of themselves, to look at the natural world and its intricacies to understand what it is we have destroyed. That context from the quote above makes the line land harder. Saxon-Hill's whole practice is built on the from-life part — she brings flowers back from the LA flower market, arranges them in her studio, then paints them over one or two weeks as they wilt and die. That's a very literal, extended version of "painting from life": she's not just observing a static subject once, she's tracking a slow transformation in real time. —Evan Pricco
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