Keiran Brennan Hinton: Towards Sentimentality
8 June - 8 July 2021
Charles Moffett
511 Canal Street, NYC

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See checklist linked below for artwork info. For install shots and studio images, credit is included in the file title.

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Charles Moffett is pleased to present Towards Sentimentality, a solo presentation of 18 never-exhibited works by the painter Keiran Brennan Hinton (b. 1992, Toronto; Yale MFA 2016), who is based in New York but returned to his homeland of Canada for the pandemic lockdown. The exhibition is an intimate, diaristic record of Brennan Hinton’s pandemic lockdown, most of which he spent at a 103-year-old schoolhouse in rural Ontario. While Brennan Hinton’s past work has been about observing and documenting the lives of others, his forced pandemic isolation yielded his first presentation composed entirely of works pertaining to his own life.

Brennan Hinton grew up in metro Toronto. He and his recently-retired-schoolteacher mother, who are “city people” to the extent that neither of them had a driver’s license until this year, bought a century-old schoolhouse in rural Ontario, unknowingly at the start of the pandemic. The building had been crudely converted for residential living but retained the majority of its historical character and untouched architectural details. The school, which closed in 1967, was a fixture of the small town, hosting no more than 60 pupils at any given time (several of whom, now in their 60s and older, have stopped by in the past year to see the state of Brennan Hinton’s residential conversion). Evident in the exhibition’s paintings are signs of these past personal histories – the pink and blue gendered entrances; the antique coat hooks; the milk glass light shades (which the artist found at a local antique shop and restored to the schoolhouse). “The interior of the space has served so many different lives,” Brennan Hinton explains, “and I often wonder about the small record we leave on the spaces we move through and how those spaces become a container of memory.”

Eleven of the paintings in the show, which explore personal histories through the details of the 1918 schoolhouse, were created in sequence as the artist slowly settled in, transforming the schoolhouse into “home” when he realized that what was originally intended as a part-time country art studio at his mother’s new house would indefinitely be his sole residence. Another seven works, rendered at a quarter-scale of the smallest schoolhouse paintings, were created when lockdown restrictions loosened. The setting of these seven works is the small Toronto apartment of the person Brennan Hinton had started dating just before the pandemic. The two sets of paintings employ the same conceptual approach of quickly capturing a distinct moment in time, but whereas the schoolhouse paintings are about settling into a specific building, the smaller works are imbued with a different notion of ‘home.’ Created during short weekend visits with his new girlfriend, they carry the decided warmth of a new relationship. One of the more striking examples of the differentiation is the unassuming figurative presence of Brennan Hinton’s girlfriend in Tatum Working (2020).

The principal focuses of Brennan Hinton’s practice include the formal painting process; the act of observation; reflections of domestic intimacy; the plein-air discipline; and interiority. For the new exhibition in particular, the conceptual thrust combines the intrigue of the 1918 schoolhouse building (and its historically layered qualities) with the notion of finding beauty in the mundane (as many were forced to do during the pandemic). It’s also about capturing the essence of what allows humans to feel ‘at home.’ Summed up in Brennan Hinton’s own words, “I hope to preserve the feeling of intimacy and closeness I’ve felt this past year, with the people I’ve been with and the spaces I’ve lived in.” He adds: “This kind of vulnerability is new for me.”

A preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download high-resolution image files. Image reuse must be with credit to Charles Moffett, unless otherwise noted in the file title.