Five on the First

September 2026
Lauren Anaïs Hussey

“Lauren Anaïs Hussey’s paintings stage moments of perceptual uncertainty, inviting viewers into a visual schema where the boundaries between representation, abstraction, and linguistic devices are placed in constant flux. Hussey’s work often features trompe l’oiel renderings of metallic surfaces – stainless steel appliances, elevator interiors, and other industrial fixtures – borrowed from the more liminal spaces of everyday life. These surfaces, with their slick reflectivity and implied tactility, become sites of both attraction and visual ambiguity. The viewer may be drawn in by their precision, only to be unsettled by the disturbances that emerge at the surface: gestural, calligraphic marks that either scratch upon or float across the picture plane, disrupting any illusion of stability or coherent space. Her paintings oscillate between the hyper-visible and the illegible, between the empathic qualities of representation and the associative logic of abstraction. Central to the work is a sustained inquiry into the space where lineages of abstraction and semiotic systems meet, where marks might resemble language but evade decipherment, or where recognizable objects might be effaced through scale, cropping, and other forms of manipulation. Her interest lies in the ambiguity that emerges when these systems collide, overlap, or break down. This is not a negation of meaning but a redistribution of it: a shift in emphasis from what is being represented, or how it is read, to how the act of looking itself unfolds.”

CV