Time Out For Tears is an exhibition of paintings based on still frames from consecutive seasons of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise. The work focuses on a ubiquitous trope in reality TV - female contestants crying on camera. As the viewer moves through the room, they are confronted over and over with an onslaught of tears, sobs and weeping women - much like the promotional videos filled with smash cuts of emotion that the paintings are based on. The work forces the viewer and artist to be complicit in the show’s voyeurism and manipulation, where women’s bodies are sites of surveillance and tears become bodily proof of authenticity. The exhibition space becomes a venue for the display of human emotion and a document of the spectacle of consumption. The work contemplates the commercialization of romantic love, the exploitation of women's bodies and mental state and the creeping grip reality TV has taken on American culture and politics over the last two decades.
Kristin Hough is an artist, educator and curator newly based in Reno, Nevada. She received her BA from Wesleyan University and her MFA from UC Davis, where she was awarded the Provost and Margrit Mondavi Fellowships. Her work has been exhibited nationally and featured in New American Paintings, Friend of the Artist and Hyperallergic. In addition, she’s been an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center and Los Angeles’s ECF Downtown Art Center, and recently released a book with National Monument Press. She co-founded an artist-run project space, Outback Arthouse, and has curated exhibitions in Las Vegas, Reno, Portland and throughout Los Angeles. She's currently teaching drawing and design at UNLV and UNR, painting stills from reality TV and collaborating on the land art project Pinewood Vortex.
On exhibit at Laughlin Library from January 23, 2022 through April 9, 2022
Monday: 10:00AM – 7:00PM
Tuesday: 10:00AM – 7:00PM
Wednesday: 10:00AM – 7:00PM
Thursday: 10:00AM – 7:00PM
Friday: 10:00AM – 6:00PM
Saturday: 10:00AM – 6:00PM
Sunday: 1:00PM – 5:00PM
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