Lina Tharsing
Chez Elle
September 1–October 12, 2021
MARCH is pleased to announce our first solo presentation of works by Lina Tharsing, a collaborative online exhibition installed and photographed in the artist’s home.
Lina Tharsing’s home is located in Lexington, Kentucky, tucked away on a side street, a short walk from the city’s downtown center. The rooms are padded with woven rugs and wooden shelves, decorated with a variety of books and catalogues, flourishing plants, and innumerable artworks. Paintings––those of Tharsing’s parents and others––adorn the walls, reflected in the mirrors hung around the house. The back garden leads to two lofty studios, brimming with a variety of artistic paraphernalia. The effect is a mix of Southern charm, bohemian repose, and gentle nostalgia. Here is Tharsing’s world... read more
Detail of Fennel, 2021, oil on canvas, 12 x 9 inches.
Installation view, Chez Elle, 2021. Photographed by Alan Rideout.
(Tharsing) sees what is passed over and walked past as full of cosmic potential and theoretical musing and invites us to do the same.
– Paul Michael Brown
Detail of Fountain, 2021, oil on canvas, 12 x 9 inches.
I am always looking for the precise moment where the subject seems both real and surreal or magical.
I believe that multiple realities can simultaneously exist and that something can be both real and artificial at the same time.
– Lina Tharsing
Lina Tharsing
Chez Elle
September 1–October 12, 2021
Lina Tharsing’s home is located in Lexington, Kentucky, tucked away on a side street, a short walk from the city’s downtown center. The rooms are padded with woven rugs and wooden shelves, decorated with a variety of books and catalogues, flourishing plants, and innumerable artworks. Paintings––those of Tharsing’s parents and others––adorn the walls, reflected in the mirrors hung around the house. The back garden leads to two lofty studios, brimming with a variety of artistic paraphernalia. The effect is a mix of Southern charm, bohemian repose, and gentle nostalgia. Here is Tharsing’s world.
In 2016, after her parents’ passing, Tharsing moved back into her childhood home, occupying the studio that had once been her father’s. This situation produced a sort of creative echo for Tharsing and she began to explore the deep connections toward the home and her parents. Chez Elle is born from this echoing and the artist’s interactions with her immediate surroundings: rooms known by heart, neighborhood rituals, and family artifacts. These particular circumstances lend themselves to a cumulative practice, one defined by overlapping histories and reflections on temporality. The paintings investigate the banal alongside the uncanny, echoing the artist’s environment and experience through literal depictions of place. Memory is explored not as a neural experience, but as a doorway to the supernatural, a tool to revisit past occurrences and add to them. Light insinuates the presence of other planes, posing sunbeams and shadows as signs of ghosts gone unseen. In parallel, the paintings treasure quotidian objects, positioning them as the grounding element for more ephemeral notions.
These reverberations carry through the show’s installation, choreographed by the gallery in collaboration with Tharsing and photographed by Alan Rideout. The paintings are aligned––sometimes exactly––with the site of their inspiration, forming thresholds between each iteration. The home serves as the stage for an ongoing dialogue: these photographs reveal Tharsing’s environment, the paintings, her reality. The works can be welcoming, nostalgic, meditative, and melancholy; they may reveal complex inspirations while concealing private details. More distant memories of sitting in the kitchen with her parents or watching them work in the studio are layered with recent happenings: passing quietly through the garden, returning home from a long journey, greeting her beloved dog, Benny. Tharsing presents a portrait of this complex and precious place, navigating spirits, legacy, and mundane objects alike.
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Lina Tharsing
Berry Picker, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Waiting Watching, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Untitled, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Tomato, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
The Farm, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
The Eyes Have It, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Sliced, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Sky Mirror, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Set Your Heart on Fire, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Pine Mountain, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Outdoors Comes Indoors, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
One Hundred Year Flood, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Obelisk, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Morning View, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Hisel Farm, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Goodlett’s House, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Mike’s Yard, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Gloaming, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Front Porch, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Fountain, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Flight, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Fennel, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Dreaming Flying, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Catching Light, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Broccoli Flowers and Cow Tooth, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches
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Lina Tharsing
Bedroom Light, 2021
Oil on canvas
12 x 9 inches