Hank Reavis

Maximum Overdrive

July 30th - August 28th. 2022

HANK REAVIS
MAXIMUM OVEDRIVE
SOLO EXHIBITION (MAIN GALLERY)
EXHIBITION DATES: JULY 30TH - AUGUST 28TH. 2022
OPENING RECEPTION: SAT, JULY 30TH FROM 6:00 - 9:00 PM
GALLERY HOURS: TUES - SAT / 1 PM - 6 PM
NEW IMAGE ART. 7920 SANTA MONICA BLVD. LOS ANGELES. CA. 90046

New Image Art is pleased to present Maximum Overdrive, the debut solo exhibition of airbrush painter Hank Reavis’ opening on July 30th, 2022. This is Reavis’ first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

“Maybe tomorrow it’ll be our world again…” -Laura Harrington/Brett

Dino De Laurentiis’ 1986 film adaptation of a Stephen King story, Maximum Overdrive, sees humans tormented and hunted by a suddenly animated machine world, with possessed Semi trucks stalking the heroes, soda dispensers violently shooting out soda cans, and an ATM reading “You are an asshole” to a customer, the moment of the film in the mid-1980s harped on anxieties of a world rapidly becoming networked, interfaced, and an exponential increase in image velocity. In such a moment, a new visual regime took hold, one of maximalism and lightness. In his first solo exhibition at New Image, Hank Reavis (b. 1997, Seattle, WA) borrows from a pulpy type of enticement, reminiscent of the paperback covers one might see at an airport newsstand- a design which is indeed meant to countermand the old maxim “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Reavis describes these dense paintings as invitations to do just that, to navigate content at a liminal, lateral, simultaneous surface level, in paintings that map out the contents of their narratives all at once, in a logic that is more ideogrammatic than symbolic. Reavis describes a moment in the recent, post-pandemic landscape that perhaps parallels the image-angst of the mid ‘80’s that we encountered in De Laurentiis’ film. For the artist, a cognitive shift in experiencing life in the outside world through mediated proxies of flat virtuality eventually led to what I’d call a “pulp inference” type of thinking: takeout food, straight-to-NetFlix movies, zoom exhibitions. So, Reavis returns to the characters and obsolete mechanisms of a moment in which virtuality was just emerging as a world concern, and machines were taking on life in new, exciting, and terrifying ways. In the 2020s, biometric data accretion, artificial intelligence, and genetically modified organisms see the machines inching closer and closer.

TEXT BY: BERGEN HENDRICKSON

Hank Reavis (b. 1997, Seattle, WA) is a painter primarily working in airbrush to react to the current hyper-saturated visual culture and his anxiety around authorship in this image climate. His compositions draw from internet stock-image databases, textbook archives, movie posters, and pulp cover art, in addition to his own memories and emotional triggers. Hank's paintings connect collective and individual memory through his meticulous, hard-edged airbrush renderings of ostensibly universal and private images. The density of his compositions consists of a pre-renaissance style of lateral, schematic narratives, which he often approaches in multiple versions, as diptychs and triptychs. Drawn to airbrush for its associations with photo retouching, poster design, and its multitudinous manifestations in street culture, Reavis repurposes the medium, using fine mists of paint to create an atmospheric aura punctuated by bold forms, mimicking the slippery nature of meaning and memory. Glimpses of imagery and technologies both from the heyday of airbrush and the current milieu give these paintings the inflection of airbrush accelerated by the influence of digital processing. His most recent work has engaged in how consumer relations to technologies from that era (especially anxious, even antagonistic ones) have undergone simultaneous peaks and troughs of optimism and fear since the rise of networked digitality. Reavis has shown in LA, New York, Miami, Toronto, and Seattle; this most recent exhibition marks his first solo exhibition with New Image Gallery. Recent press includes a feature in Lilypad Magazine Issue 2.