HASANI SAHLEHE
Stretch My Hands
Heart is Full, 2022, airbrushed acrylic on paper mounted to panel, 60 x 48 in.
Exhibition Details:
September 2- October 29
Reception: Friday, September 16th, 2022 6-9 PM
Laney Contemporary is pleased to present Stretch My Hands, an exhibition of new work by Atlanta-based artist Hasani Sahlehe. Born in St. Thomas U.S. Virgin Islands, Sahlehe explores the properties and edges of color and light through the language of painting as a poetic medium with deeply felt ties to music, relationships, and spirituality. Stretch My Hands continues in this extension of the medium through the artist’s experimentation with materiality and process. To stretch one’s hands upward is often a gesture of gratitude, celebration, and openness. It is sometimes a way to greet the day. To stretch the hands out and around is to become active, engaged, expansive, and curious. Sahlehe’s processes embrace all of the dimensionalities of painting as a form of stretching, reaching, experimenting, and pushing the limits of body, mind, and medium.
The exhibition navigates painting as an action, coming to terms with what it means to be human, and recognizing that art has the ability to extend our perceived limitations. This selection intuits painting’s relationship to the body as both physical and contemplative. Delicate, distant, color fields are presented in the main gallery; these works on paper mounted on wooden panels produce an atmospheric effect of color particles that seem to float like an afterimage as we feel the presence of morning sun, rain, fog, earth and sky. This spectrum expands what we are capable of noticing, what we are capable of feeling.
