Peregrine Honig’s New Paintings Are About Women Waiting
It all starts with a womb. To see the seven large-scale oil paintings (all 6' x 8 ⅛'), you enter through deep velvet puce-red curtains that look like swollen labia. The vast gallery space is dark except where the work hangs high, and while the room is entirely open, there is a gentleman’s agreement to start by passing through the curtains. On opening night, the space is crowded, and people wait to pass through one at a time; the curtains are not wide enough for two. The lights go out every half hour, signaling it is time to leave the paintings. Then the lights come up again, allowing entry for the next group mingling nearby.
The lights, the entry, and the use of only one quadrant of a Costco-sized gallery all indicate that artist Peregrine Honig — who was across town showing smaller works at Blue Gallery while another person used an iPad to dictate the lighting remotely — is intent on creating an experience entirely under her control.
Waiting on others to make decisions for you is the point of “Player,” the culmination of Honig’s two years as a resident of Studios, Inc. in Kansas City, Missouri, which opened November 17, 2023. While the artist often elicits a sense of macabre humor within her work, I see no humor this time. As a mid-career artist who has embraced her voice, Honig’s conversation in this work is brutally clear.
Says Honig, “Women wait. We wait to get our periods. We wait to fall in love. We wait to make families. We wait for birth. Some of these are simply the pressure of waiting…As we lose autonomy as people who give birth, the waiting is louder.”
She uses fairy tale culture and mythology as her source material. Characters are drawn from Red Riding Hood, Persephone, Sleeping Beauty, princes, and princesses, then recast in archaic and contemporary cultural settings that speak on a woman’s right to choose, her sexual health, and reproductive rights.
Each work centers on a figure surrounded by twin-like imagery, harkening back to Honig’s career-long use of identical creatures in her work. In this body, her use of dual imagery, specifically Memento and Bonsai Demons, the implication is treacherous.
Holding an infant in Bonsai Demons, a mothering figure with clawed feet, wearing what seems to be hoodie pajamas, green gaseous clouds threaten to annihilate the duo. However, both faces offer no fear, and this steadfastness upholds a moral core. Whether they accept their fate or are impervious makes no difference; they are consciously brave, standing with clawed feet on a taut red thread holding firm.
Throughout many of these paintings is a red ribbon. In Chinese culture, it is the Red Thread of Fate, symbolic of one’s destiny; follow it, go wherever it may take you; you can twist, knot, bend, and shape it, but you can never break it. In these paintings, some figures stand on it, stretch it, but remain unbroken.
While there is no red ribbon here, Memento bears an equally intimidating pair of toys with weighted bottoms (Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down) bearing the faces of mid-twentieth-century circus cutouts. Their size and ability to remain upright attempt to intimidate the cloaked figure holding two heads. Again, twins. Again, nonchalance.
With Custody, we do not see twins as much as we still get the central figure surrounded, standing in a sinking boat, holding that red thread, and letting us know that going down with the ship is inevitable.
In all these paintings, the human-esque faces, bleached skull-head, hoodies, claw-like feet, arms as legs — are masks — we get no true sense of who they are, only waiting to be who they need to be in the moment. The viewer can consider this a form of armor, protection from overbearing forces dictating circumstances.
Honig’s paintings deftly portray the double standard between sexes that has existed for millennia. A circumstance women have been dismantling for as long because it all starts with a womb.
“Player” — seven paintings, two years in residence: A Peregrine Honig Solo Exhibition at Studios Inc Exhibit Hall, 1708 Campbell Street, Kansas City, MO,
