NATURE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND - a consideration

Christin Couture
William Hosie

Brattleboro Museum & Art Center

The works of Christin Couture and William Hosie are, for the most part, not at all similar.
Still, in agreeing to a conscious collaboration in the exhibition Nature is no your Friend,
the two artists have bound their mutual statement with bonds of the most powerful visual sort
-the bonds of color. Though more subtle or incidental in Couture's rather surreal paintings,
the colors red and green are authoritative in Hosie's sculptural assemblages, which spotlight icons
of public authority such as street signs and traffic lights.

-Tom Sturm, Preview Magazine

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Presentation

It has been said that opposites attract… and we are certainly opposites,
held together like magnetic poles in check. This frisson can produce wonderfully
unexpected yet seemingly familiar results when sustained in artistic collaboration.
From this unique vantage, with its shared discourse perpetually and telepathically
at work, the synergistic possibilities flow naturally. ‘Two heads are better than one’,
but somehow we end up with three.
In Nature is not your Friend – a consideration, Christin Couture’s painting –
- ‘finished’, unresolved, abandoned, and even fragmented — was carefully resourced
 by the artists to undergo transformation through William Hosie’s strategic imposition of color
 –- coded ‘probe germ’ super catalysts, imposed to expose.
The results then called Couture back to respond, or not.

The natural world, its inhabitants, their structures, and things are roundly represented
here as subjects, then treated as ‘objects’. Actual objects were brought in as well.
Our shared penchant for the arcane flavors all of this, especially in the images of children,
 serving as a ‘remove in time’ to emphasize through the Romantic what could be lost or transformed.
The children here are embodiments of innocence and vulnerability on one hand, or willfulness
and destruction (bad seeds) on the other. They engage their impulses and undercurrents from
 within as they occupy an uncertain environment outside. The color coding here cuts right through
 to this tension and its related indecision, that place between drama and stasis.

The injection of solid color components could be likened to signage (highway, traffic lights),
or other visual regulator/indicators intended to direct human behavioral responses.
The oppositional tension in red/green is particularly important (cautions in yellow).
Naturally, associations and implications abound. As used here, color behaves more factually,
like an object. Whether a force from within or without, this influential ‘muscle from the margin’
can command. Imminence prevails.

The world here then becomes a kind of ‘no man’s land’ at the mercy of invasive bar codes,
signage, directives, gauges, atmospheres, thermometers, sticker tags, and more
– all peripheral influences/indicators that bring the work toward a next stage.
The gallery space itself is actively integrated into the work. Paced disclosure follows
pedestrian flow to access or deny, while still insuring a collective, situational read
— an elaborately shifting 3D ‘story board’ as a cinematic conduit out of frame.

– Christin Couture and William Hosie