Normal, IL
It’s tempting to treat Erin Hayden’s exuberantly excessive canvases as rebuses, and perhaps they are, but figuring out some elusive linguistic meaning is only part of the fun. The rest is accessible to all: the delirious thrill of mixed forms, styles, surfaces and subjects, sometimes conjured directly from Hayden’s dexterous paintbrush, sometimes in combination with inkjet canvases. Painted splatters lie atop printed ones, next to fuzzy knit horses, while bits of paint cluster near images of mid-century computers, full with their own kind of bits. There’s something of Sigmar Polke here, and Robert Rauschenberg too. To that Hayden adds an admirable facility with paint and words, a combination of control with pleasure and play that produces a diptych like “Tulips are better than none”: green and red canvases verdant with flowers and lush with a pair of lips, so happy to be paintings it’s hard not to kiss them.
—Lori Waxman 3/24/16 5:15 PM