THRU AUGUST 26
– MCA Denver
Honey is an exhibition of new work by Denver-based photographer Kristen Hatgi Sink. Sink has created a series of videos featuring the exhibition’s eponymous sticky substance—dripping and pouring over composed objects and human subjects. In them, flowers, fruit, and a young woman remain nearly motionless as honey runs over their respective delicate forms. Their inertia and Sink’s composition and use of a cold, bright light recall traditional styles of painting such as the portrait or the still-life. In the middle of the gallery, and in contrast to the videos’ delicate imagery, sits an austere glass vitrine containing honey. A simple, geometric basin resembling a minimalist sculpture, the tank will be the setting for multiple performances taking place throughout the duration of the exhibition.
Honey furthers Sink’s work with natural materials through the medium of photography. She uses butterflies, flowers, insects, fruit, and fish, in addition to human subjects, to create baroque scenes. With the videos, vitrine, and performances she created for MCA Denver, she explores honey’s cultural significance. The substance represents wealth, nutrition, sexuality and love, health and healing, and sacred love. Its chemical properties make it a natural preservative and as such it can also be associated with death. More recently, it has become a symbol of environmentalism, as the threats to bees’ existence have become better understood. Sink’s use of honey suggests many of these meanings and the contradictions that exist among them.
Kristen Hatgi Sink was born in 1984 in Denver, Colorado, where she currently lives and works. She earned a BFA at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work has been exhibited at venues across the country and abroad, including at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Japanese Paper Museum Ino, and Cohju Contemporary Art.