Slipping between representation and abstraction, Colette’s paintings build spaces where psychic mystery mingles with physical experience. The perspective of their landscapes offers a suggestion of vast space. Rolling slopes and layered horizon lines appear without any grounding points of human scale, further intensifying a decentered objecthood. On the surfaces of the canvases, layers of paint are infused with natural elements such as incense resin, petals, flower essences, salt, and ash, which provide material connections to moments of ritual and agency. At times, an illegible script appears in a three-dimensional scrawl across the plane, evoking an urgent appeal to, or perhaps from, the sky. 

The exhibition’s title, Derealization, refers to the psychological phenomenon of emotional or perceptual distortions more commonly understood as an out-of-body experience. This experience of disembodiment can be unsettling and unpleasant, but can also operate as an informative state, which invites comparisons to open-ended dream spaces, expanded views on the human sense of time, and the space sought by the Buddhist goal of stepping back from the trappings of the self.

Inspired by artists, poets, and ecofeminists such as Joan Mitchell, Etel Adnan, Donna Haraway, and Clarice Lispector, Colette probes permutations of language and the human fantasy of renewal and eternal return through the divine, the natural, and the technological. Colette’s tightly-edited palette of colors has expanded subtly in new directions, with hues such as a spring green or a dusty rose, suggesting room for moments of exuberance and rejuvenation. The works brush up against the individualistic undercurrents of Southern California and the climatic haze of the Golden State while looking towards the unconscious tugs of sacred presences amongst a vast cosmos. 

Press release and images via Harper’s LA.