Proof of Life: Things That Ache Softly at HEDGE Gallery

Like discovering a mysterious bruise on your thigh, tilting your nose toward a trail of perfume, or tightening your fist around a receding memory, Things That Ache Softly is an exhibition imbued with the intrigue of trying to put your finger on something you can’t quite name, something you had maybe even tried in vain to forget. At her HEDGE Gallery in Cleveland’s 78th Street Studios, curator Hilary Gent has assembled a masterful and moving collection of paintings by Maeve Billings, Katy Richards, and Madison Mayle, whose depictions of nature in various phases of decay and becoming invoke an intimate melancholy that is at once uninhibited and refined.

On opening night, the hum doesn’t just come from the captivated crowd. At one point I fanned the air around my face, convinced I’d heard the high, strident drone of a fly buzzing in my ear, simply by staring at the magenta entrails of a supine rat. Any downcast eyes in the room quickly turn into dilated pupils and gasping grins. These artists don’t hold us to the rigidity of exactitude. They envelop us in the certainty of visceral sensation. Still life would be an understatement.

Maeve Billings, a queer, nonbinary Cleveland-based artist and graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art, works in oils on large-format canvas — some pieces stretching past four feet — to render subjects that most of us instinctively look away from: roadkill, bones, felled birds, insides splashed out. In Ossuary, tight cropping and a low angle draw us into a toothy grin and a gaping wink; it’s as though the subjects are in on a cosmic joke we have yet begun to comprehend. In Funeral (Brainard Rd.) and Grand Jeté (Shaker Blvd.), Billings plants death squarely on Cleveland’s own streets, where the specificity of local geography becomes a kind of tenderness, a refusal to let these small lives go unmarked. Sunny shades of orange and vibrant cherry evoke layers of flesh dripping from bleached bones. Theirs is not a world of mourning but of reckoning. As Billings has said of their practice, the wavering dynamic between attraction and repulsion is precisely where meaning can thrive and transform.

Katy Richards, who holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, offers a different but equally honest confrontation. Her use of thickly applied oil paint adds a lush, bodily weight to each panel. Richards’s flowers do more than symbolize Eros. They have lived through it leaving. Her brushwork is both controlled and yearning: petals caught in the act of parting, ripe blooms lilting heavily toward rot. In Portrait I & II, the high-contrast crescendo of a Fibonacci fractal invokes the vulnerability of unfolding on purpose. Like Gershwin’s “Summertime” or Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” Richards’s work carries the morbid dissonance of wanting to hold on to the stem of something beautiful despite its thorns.

Madison Mayle grew up in Appalachia, and her botanical dreamscapes carry that mysterious inheritance. Her landscapes don’t ask to be observed so much as to absorb you. Working in lightly layered oils to create depth, Mayle builds compositions from Angel’s Trumpet blossoms, feathered foliage, and dispersed glowing orbs that recall will-o’-the-wisps drifting through translucent membranes and humid air. Her titles — Currents of Becoming and the Space Between, Lingering, Not Lost, Night Is Listening— name the threshold states her paintings inhabit: not quite here, not quite gone, suspended in a liminal attentiveness that rewards the patient viewer. In Mayle’s world, depths of vision converge and morph. The longer you look, the farther you see into what could be a distant spirit realm or an unfamiliar place within yourself.

Something about the shared use of oil paint conspires in all of this. With its slowness, its density, the way it holds light rather than reflecting it, these three artists have each reached for the same ancient medium to process loss, desire, and the body’s impermanence. The accumulated weight of pigment and linseed becomes heady and atmospheric. It is why the room induces a kind of synesthesia: why you leave smelling something you couldn’t name, hearing a frequency just below sound, touching a bruise you didn’t know you had.

Though more personal than political, the cumulative tension of these three bodies of work presses quietly on the viewer’s conscience. Gent has arranged them into a corpus that throbs and sighs, a harmonious whole that invites rather than commands. The memento mori in Things That Ache Softly aren’t just a reminder of imminent death. They are proof of life. Insistent, sensory, unresolved. Billings’s roadkill is impossible to pass by. Richards’s wilting flowers are still mid-song. Mayle’s thresholds cradle and caress you, in the in-between, for longer than you expected to stay. What unites them is not death, rather their unwillingness to make that the whole point. The point was never the ending. It was everything that ached before it.

Things that Ache Softly
Katy Richards, Maeve Billings, Madison Mayle
April 17 – May 30

HEDGE Gallery
78th Street Studios
1300 West 78th Street, Suite 200
Cleveland, Ohio 44102.