Annie Hémond Hotte: Parallel Land

May 3 - June 7, 2025

The Pit Los Angeles

The Pit is pleased to present “Parallel Land,” a solo exhibition of new works by Montreal-born, Brooklyn-based painter Annie Hémond Hotte, her first with the gallery. The show will be on view from May 3 to June 7, 2025. The artist will attend the opening reception on Saturday, May 3, from 5 - 7 pm.

“The labyrinth is the perfect oxymoron, which opposes the chaos of its tortuous and dark corridors to the geometric precision of its external forms,” wrote literary scholar Gaetano Cipolla. This sentiment can be applied to Annie Hémond Hotte’s meticulously rendered labyrinthine paintings. From a distance, the warp and weft of her innumerable marks coalesce in decorative textile patterns, such as herringbone, chevrons, vermicular lines, and tracery, as well as allegorical forms like verdant trees, sinuous women, mythical animals, and stone masonry. Not unlike the elaborate tapestries of the Middle Ages, the individual threads—or lines—are subsumed by the millefleurs or the greater scenes.

Still, as you draw closer to the canvas, the obsessive, seemingly infinite dabs and dashes that constitute each swath of grass and ornamental border become increasingly distinct. The dense layers of color, ranging from olive to vermilion, cerulean, saffron, plum to celadon, begin to emerge from beneath the deceptively simple surface hues. Thanks to her layering process, each unrepeatable color is the direct result of the surrounding hues. The lateral flatness is complicated by thick, built-up brushstrokes and murky, variegated tones that merge the tactile with the optical. One imagines that if they were to run their fingers along the surface, it would feel as soft and supple as a woven fabric. Up close, the oil paint itself appears to be the artist’s subject. Stand back again, and the anti-perspectival images shimmer vivid and definite.

Hotte’s unsparing attention resists generalization and painterly shorthand on both levels. The accumulation of detail, chroma, and texture forces the viewer's gaze to constantly refocus as it shifts back and forth between the animated flurry of dots that comprise any given corner and the overall pictorial plane. As a result, the distance between the universal and the particular, the idea and the object, is temporarily obscured. Flashes of perception emerge from newly illuminated connections. Her deft use of reflection and its attendant repetition and series not only recalls traditional textile techniques but also lends the works their dreamy, folkloric quality. Moving from the outside in, Hotte's nearly symmetrical compositions are the product of parallel construction.

In the collected essays Labyrinth: Studies on an Archetype, Cipolla describes labyrinths as sites of controlled chaos as well as experiences of lostness. They are imagined as places of transformation, inverse wombs, intricate forests, and journeys into the unconscious. One can imagine Hotte’s labyrinths in similar terms. In Labyrinth Women and Loophole, twin labyrinthine female figures—composed of tightly nested curvilinear chambers, reminiscent of Matryoshka dolls—are subsumed by a patchwork of similarly limned botanical forms. That the women, along with the trees, grasses, and shrubs surrounding them, share repeating motifs and colorways emphasizes their mutual fertility, but also suggests that the women may be, if not entrapped, then perhaps lost within the real or metaphorical forest.

The Wisdom Seeker (philosopher) portrays a woman in an azure-striped tunic standing within a walled garden. Scattered throughout the serpentine rows and columns of greenery are various totemic objects, including a goblet, a chessboard, a pomegranate, and a spiral snail shell. While the precise nature of the quest remains unknown, it’s clear that the stakes are psychological, and the enduring rewards cerebral. The internalized maze in Wisdom Seeker (philosopher) is made visible in the Minotaur at Sundown (labyrinth woman and labyrinth). Here, an emerald and saffron-striped woman presides over a cylindrical emerald labyrinth, the center of which appears as the womb at the heart of the female form. Not unlike the artist at work in her studio, day after day, the woman is alone within a world that is and is not her own creation.

In this way, traveling to the heart of the labyrinth is as much a return to one’s source—the dark, twisted interiors of oneself—as it is a heroic journey—a formalized sequence of actions and events. Hotte’s parallel lines move in both directions simultaneously; her compositions envision the place where inside and out, here and there, the past and present meet, the ever-widening circle again complete. —Tara Anne Dalbow

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@the-pit.la.

Inquire