An Unquiet House

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” —Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House In Kati Henning’s debut New York solo exhibition, An Unquiet House, images float and hover, threatening to liquesce and slide off into the ether. Reminiscent of immersive video games and painted film backdrops, this series of paintings presents sites of imagination and world-building: spaces that bridge the gap between reality and fantasy. Henning’s imagined interiors are ornate dreamscapes, shaped in part by an impoverished upbringing in rural Union County, Ohio. Born in 1983, Henning was raised in a conservative and intensely religious household, in a lineage of skilled tradesmen who prioritized building a life with their hands. It was a hardscrabble existence, rooted in working the land alongside nearby Amish and Mennonite communities, where the practical and functional were valued above all else. Ornamentation was rejected for the additional labor it required to clean and maintain. As a rejoinder to a childhood of sensory deprivation, Henning packs her paintings with architectural details, fanciful trompe l’oeil, and sumptuous furnishings. Saturated color and Victorian aesthetics create spaces filled with embellishment, art, and decorative objects—a forceful rebuttal to memories of home as a drab, brown shell, deplete of comfort, beauty, and color. As a young teenager, she lived outside in a tent for weeks at a time, finding refuge from a volatile home life in the surrounding fields. References to the countryside creep into the baroque interiors, lending the images an uncanny weight, while her dramatically lit landscapes brim with portent. In her paintings, she draws viewers into an alternate world – “the way I wish it could have been, instead of the way that it actually was.” Paint is applied in transparent washes using a garden sprayer, allowing Henning’s images to slowly materialize and solidify. These locations flicker between realism and theatricality, inviting the viewer to gaze over the brink. At once seductive and unstable, the works offer a glimpse around the façade, where edges begin to molder and the floorboards decay beneath our feet. At a moment when many are awakening to the precarity of daily existence, An Unquiet House reflects the dissolving illusion of the American dream. Kati Henning received her BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2006, with a focus in painting. She lives and works in Ohio.