OCHI is pleased to present Soft Echo, Hannah Knight Leighton’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, on view in Ketchum, Idaho by appointment only from August 21 through October 16, 2021.

Soft Echo is comprised of ten large-scale paintings made entirely of brightly-colored yarn that feature abstraction as a contemporary protagonist and a constitutive function. Though Leighton grew up in a family of crafters and makers, she is also a child of post-internet hyper-capitalist consumerism. Leighton begins each painting by going back to today’s magic drawing board—an iPad—which facilitates both online shopping and digital doodling. Drawing from life, incorporating translations of oddly-shaped commodities spied in shopping malls alongside excerpts of beloved historical works of art—Leighton clone stamps, lassos, and layers multiple compositions, creating irreverent interruptions across the screen. The results resemble portals into previous configurations, sometimes zoetropic abstractions that mutate as they multiply or brain-bending multi-dimensional puzzle parts that coagulate into impossible architectures.

Leighton’s quirky aesthetic strategies are influenced by the zombification of the attention economy and Windows-cum-pop-up advertising but can be more formally attributed to the artist’s lifelong dance with dyslexia—a neurobiological condition that creates non-fluent shape recognition. Leighton employs her neurodiversity in the creation of visual support structures and visible breaks in continuity. This embrace of space, of deletion, of emptiness, of natural ways of seeing is precisely what makes the logic of Leighton’s paintings congeal.

Leighton transfers a completed digital sketch to monk’s cloth—a textile with a distinctive basket weave named either for the coarse habits worn by monastics or for a 17^th Century general who looted the mills of a Scottish village. With one hand on the trigger and one hand guiding the foot, Leighton braces her body against the kickback of the tufting gun, as synthetic yarns propel into the stretched cloth in rapid succession. She athletically maneuvers color by color, intuitively following a spool of directional energy and building texture until a surface hits yarn saturation. Leighton then translates each painting’s name with a small hand loom, weaving reversed and interrupted letter-shapes—an insight into her sight—finally affixing the title-ribbon around the edges of each gordian knot of a painting—a mythological and poetic gesture of denouement.

Hannah Knight Leighton (b. 1991, Baltimore, MD) makes large-scale abstract paintings using a tufting gun that both uncover and create tension between traditional craft techniques, painting history, the aesthetics of casual consumerism, and the influence of digital technologies on contemporary perception. Leighton received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2015 and an MFA from University of New Mexico in 2021. She has participated in the Green Olive Arts Residency program in Morocco and her work has been featured in New American Paintings. Leighton currently lives and works in Albuquerque, NM.