When I first heard about the pairing of Jai Hart and Kelly Worman in a two-person show at Freight + Volume, I was puzzled. Their formal vocabularies appeared too distinct, too dissonant. But upon entering the exhibition, my skepticism dissolved. Their differences are not discordant—they are dialectical. Both artists, working through abstraction and form, propose modes of seeing and making that are sensitive, inquisitive, and quietly defiant. While their materials and gestures diverge, Hart and Worman converge in a feminist-postmodern sensibility that challenges the hegemonic logics of painting, and, more subtly, the gendered histories that underpin it.
The show coincided with my visit to Jack Whitten’s retrospective The Messenger at the Museum of Modern Art. Whitten’s work, particularly from the 1970s, captured a moment of radical liberation within painting—a period when the medium unraveled its boundaries and welcomed new textures, tools, and temporalities. Yet this narrative, as with so many in modernist history, has been masculinized. The female painters of that era—those who troubled its definitions with intimate, porous, anti-heroic works—are only recently gaining institutional recognition. Hart and Worman’s exhibition resonates as an extension of this lineage. It echoes the structural shifts of that time and the ethos of “Painting in New York: 1971–83,” a 2022 show at KARMA Gallery that centered the visionary contributions of women artists who forged new paths beyond canonical abstraction.
Hart and Worman inherit this radicalism in their own distinct ways—not through direct homage, but through practice. Both destabilize the boundaries of what a painting can be, and, perhaps more crucially, why it should be made. Their feminist refusal is subtle but pointed: neither seeks to dominate space, perform genius, or rehearse historical tropes. Instead, they offer an aesthetics of touch, atmosphere, play, and provisionality—strategies long aligned with feminist visual culture.
Worman’s titles—Mars in Leo, Age of Aquarius, So You Think You Can Dance II—reveal an ironic poetics. The astrology references hint at an interest in extra-logical systems, a cosmology that privileges intuition and feminine knowledge. In Mars in Leo, she builds a confident visual tension through saturated fields and discordant color harmony. Yet the composition, despite its assertiveness, remains balanced, never aggressive. Age of Aquarius introduces a looser pictorial logic, where faint narrative threads interlace with atmospheric abstraction. It’s not the zodiac rendered literally, but a mood, a mythos. Her control of the medium—tight, tactile, and playful—carries the charge of process-based feminist painting, where gesture is not a sign of dominance but of presence.
In So You Think You Can Dance II, the work tilts toward the comedic. A tasseled rug becomes an object of meditation, refracted through whimsical mark-making. The oval form that hovers above the mat suggests an alien visitor and a childhood toy. Worman’s paintings don’t demand interpretation; they invite delight and speculation. This refusal of fixed meaning, this ambiguity of intention, is a postmodern tactic—but filtered through an emotional, materially grounded lens that disrupts the often cynical detachment associated with postmodern critique.
If Worman plays with surface and narrative, Hart pushes the plane of painting into space—sometimes quite literally. Her works occupy an intermediary zone between painting and sculpture. In Isoline Mapping, a red tubular conduit (poly-filled canvas) climbs the canvas’s edge, framing a central mass of gestural paint and collaged pattern—the surface ripples. The canvas itself refuses rectangularity. This is painting as an organism, as architecture. Hart’s sculptural approach recalls Jessica Stockholder’s rule-breaking hybridity, but emphasizing emotional containment rather than spatial intervention.
Hart’s smaller works—Mapping the Blue Brain, Unknown, Blue Ice—are particularly affecting. Here, she collapses landscape and memory, Matissean color and Elizabeth Murray’s domestic surrealism. As Matisse described, a pink sky coexists with yellow foliage; Hart tubular form embraces a pictorial center like a body holding breath. The polystyrene structures function as frames and arms—supportive, tender. Sentimentality, often rejected in high art discourse, is not avoided but reclaimed. Hart’s forms are vulnerable, not fragile; soft, not weak. They assert that emotional labor, sensitivity, and care are valid and radical aesthetic tools.
Hart and Worman articulate a powerful feminist vision rooted in ambiguity, affect, and resistance. Their work does not scream. It murmurs, sings, and hums. It tells us that abstraction need not be cold, that sculpture need not be monumental, and painting need not be disembodied. This exhibition embraces nuance, softness, and opacity in a cultural moment still obsessed with clarity, dominance, and hyper-visibility.
Their pairing reminds us that postmodernism isn’t just about critique—it can also be about care. And that feminism, even when abstract, still carries the weight of history—and the possibility of healing.
Make your tax-deductible donation today and help Art Spiel continue to thrive. DONATE
Jai Hart & Kelly Worman- FREIGHTANDVOLUME.COM
How to Let Go of the World: A Duet
April 11 – May 10
Riad Miah Riad Miah was born in Trinidad and currently lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Contemporary Art, Sperone Westwater, White Box Gallery, Deluxe Projects, Rooster Contemporary Art, Simon Gallery, and Lesley Heller Workshop. He has received fellowships nationally and internationally. His works are included in private, university, and corporate collections. He contributes to for Two Coats of Paint, the Brooklyn Rail, and Art Savvvy.
Related articles:
https://artspiel.org/lauriston-avery-with-riad-miah/
https://artspiel.org/guan-hong-lu-at-nunu-fine-art-new-york/
https://artspiel.org/conversation-with-sandra-eual-lee/