Lower East Side Printshop pleased to present six prints by artist Jane Kent, created in 2022 through the Printshop's invitational Publishing Residency Program.

Says Susan Tallman: Jane Kent’s new prints take up the game of mirrors set in play by Jan van Eyck and Diego Velasquez centuries ago—how do you turn reflection into a subject? How do you fix the image of something that is visually and ontologically unstable? An abstract artist, Kent says she “always starts with an object,” using drawing to uncover the ineluctable oddness of everyday things. (Recent series have anatomized cardboard boxes, clock faces and shower heads).

Her new works place loosely drawn ovals and rectangles over a backdrop of wallpaper (the residual bounty of a niece’s home improvement project); the cartoon shorthand of diagonal stripes to represent a reflective surface becomes a field of play for color, gesture and skittish perception. In Catalog, frames roam the page, unmoored from both floral wallpaper and glassy glare. In 7 a.m., a round photographic blur is partly obscured by motley white, easily read as steam. In Second Hand Sunshine, yellow splashes fall on the sketchy frame, left and right, endowing the grisaille collection of marks with the scent of a room in raking light.

Like the mirrors that Kent began drawing under the forced isolation of the pandemic, her prints are an invitation to look at looking.