Artist Pecis featured at Flagler

SAINT AUGUSTINE –  The Crisp-Ellert Art Museum on the campus of Flagler College presents an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Hilary Pecis. The exhibition, entitled “The Space In Between,” will include still life and landscape paintings emblazoned with saturated color and manipulated perspective. The artist will give a walkthrough of the exhibition on Friday, Jan. 17 at 5 p.m., followed by an opening reception until 7 p.m. The exhibit will run through Feb. 29.

Since her move to the Los Angeles area, the Southern Californian light has inspired Pecis’ work, suffusing each painting with a brightness and vivacity. Pecis captures portraits of people through both the interior and exterior spaces they occupy by using objects such as books, paintings, flowers, wallpapers, and furniture as signifiers for their human characteristics. She invites the viewer to step into intimate settings and environments through varied perspectives. The importance of perspective, the space in between, is paramount. The artist describes this in different ways: how both positive and negative space is negotiated on the canvas, as the space that we physically occupy, and how we overlap with our surroundings.

Many of the sites and scenes in Pecis’ work comes from her personal cache of photographs. Pecis’ photographs focus on certain details, which help to portray the feeling of a captured moment, and a translation of experience rather than simply a re-creation of a place. Her technique explores line, font, perspective, and color as stacks of books and vases of flowers sit on surfaces of rhythmic pattern. Familiar artworks by well-known artists dot the walls within her paintings, acknowledging those Pecis admires as well as the artist’s explorations as “a tourist trying out other marks.” Pecis’ paintings pull strength from their specific details, objects, allusions, and patterns, and the happy accidents that ensue. The artist’s process involves both skill and instinct as she adeptly opens a window onto her own experiences of Southern California, and gives us an entry point to consider the interconnectedness of the spaces and environments that we inhabit.

Pecis received her MFA as well as her BFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California. She has had recent solo exhibitions at The Pit in Glendale, CA, Halsey McKay in East Hampton, NY, and Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York, NY. Her work has been featured in exhibitions such as Vision Valley, Brand Library and Arts Center, Glendale, CA; Shadow Shop, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Fax, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; This is Your, This is My, University of Texas, San Antonio, TX; New Landscapes, Dominican University of San Rafael, San Rafael, CA; and Grounded, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA. She has been the recipient of the San Francisco Art Commission’s Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship and is a co-founder of Binder of Women, a collective of female artists based in the Los Angeles area. Pecis will have a solo exhibition at the Rachel Uffner Gallery in NYC in March of 2020. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

The Crisp-Ellert Art Museum is located in an accessible building. If you are a person with a disability and need reasonable accommodations, please contact Phil Pownall at 904-819-6460. Sign Language Interpreters are available upon request with a minimum of three days’ notice.

For further information on our programming, please visit the website at www.flagler.edu/crispellert, or contact Julie Dickover at 904-826-8530 or crispellert@flagler.edu. The museum’s hours are Monday through Friday, 10 am to 4 pm, and Saturday, 12 to 4pm, while classes are in session. Please note the museum will be closed on Monday, January 20 for Martin Luther King Day.

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