Found Objects is excited to announce Lines of Sight, the project space’s inaugural show, featuring works by Denver-based artists Jenna Annunziato and Alexander Richard Wilson and Chicago-based painter Omair Hussain.

The works in the show—landscapes, still-lifes, and abstractions—share a related approach to space and perspective, one that locates meaning in the experience of looking. They are attempts at answering, through repetition, what it is that makes an image arresting. Why is it that certain sights capture our attention, almost demand it, even as they are already leaving our vision, departing, fleeing, never to be seen again? And yet . . . something remains . . . the impression . . . a visual residue . . . memories to be triggered again, without warning or explanation, at a later date, far from their original source . . .

To construct an image—to paint a painting—is to plunge into the abysses of sight—to conjure a world not just made up of objects but of their appearance as well, as reflected and refracted across the history of art and visual culture. Inundated with images, the artist learns to appreciate their value quite literally, weighing the suggestive potential of each line, color, and mark: Will they be enough to render the thought of the work—to travel the distance and speak to the viewer through the medium of light?

The landscapes and cityscapes of Alexander Richard Wilson are not so much vistas as they are representations of the artist or viewer moving through space, traversing mountain trails and city streets, with megaliths of stone and steel looming over their heads, the atmosphere charged with a sense of uncertainty. Perspective is organized around an embodied point of view, and the use of painterly marks both describes what is seen and how it is seen.

In a similar way, the crushed can paintings of Jenna Annunziato call attention to the formal properties of garbage. Enlarged and removed from the gutter, isolated on the wall, the cans become studies of color, light, and reflection. By carefully navigating the relationship between inner and outer surface, Annunziato is able to transform the twisted metal into a visual space that recalls O'Keeffe’s flowers and desert landscapes as much as it does the draping fabrics and shining armor of Renaissance painting.

Finally, the geometric abstractions of Omair Hussain probe the limits of painting by testing how little is needed to create a picture and how much that little can do. Composed part by part, color by color, from the edge of the picture plane to its center, this bare economy of painting is made to give more than can be explained by its elements. Through a kind of abstract, painterly enjambment, Hussain registers the poetry of form as such and arrives at images possessing a strange, cinematic quality—like those that hover on the screen before the camera cuts to the next act in the drama.

Jenna Annunziato is a visual artist based in Denver, Colorado. Since graduating from State University of New York at New Paltz in 2019, she has shown work in select galleries across the Hudson Valley, NY and Denver, CO. Notable exhibitions include Hudson Valley New Folk at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, NY and solo exhibition Forest of the Forgotten at Bell Projects, Denver, CO. She was chosen for the Commissioner's Choice exhibition at the Lone Tree Arts Center in January 2023. This past summer she was in residence with Mission Street Arts in Jemez Springs, NM. She is a member of Redline Contemporary Art Center's satellite studio program and works out of a studio in the Evans School in Denver.

Alexander Richard Wilson is an African-American contemporary artist living and working in Denver, Colorado. Born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri (1993) and educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017), their painting and sculpture practices reference the spaces and depths of the American landscape we occupy, and the literal relationships between figurative shapes in image and form. Referencing their history as the product of a large, African American family, and their present context as a queer black body in the American West, they work to represent the present conditions relative to climate change and cultural shift in American society with gestural clarity.

Omair Hussain is a painter living and working in Chicago, IL. He earned his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018, and is currently a graduate student in the painting department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.