Houston Artist Hangs Funky New Works That Are Anything But Socially Distant

For Singapore-born, Dutch artist Hedwige Jacobs, self-imposed isolation in the time of Covid-19 has given her time to pause and dive even more deeply into her almost hermetic practice. "My home became my studio," says Jacobs, who came to the U.S. from the Netherlands, and speaks highly of Houston and its art scene.

"I feel you can have a voice here," says Jacobs. "You can explore, and I like to do that. I have that curiosity to keep on exploring with my drawings and see what I can do with them." Jacobs' new show at Montrose's Anya Tish Gallery, titled Come Alive for a Few Seconds, opens next week and runs through Jan. 2. It features her tiny, hand-drawn silhouette figures, on paper as well as in short, animated videos, each exhibiting their own unique physical quirks while squished together with no concern for social distancing.

On one gallery wall, a projection of over a hundred of these animated Lilliputians move about like bees in a beehive, their incessant busyness belying the weight of loneliness each figure seems to bear, even as they jump up and down or do handsprings. "That's kind of how I see people," says Jacobs, who enjoys observing how people move and behave in space. "Although we are together and we connect, we're really kind of alone with our own histories."

The show also includes one of Jacobs' disorienting "woven room" installation environments, where familiar domestic objects such as televisions and lamps are covered with interweaving black and white lines, all drawn by hand with a paint marker. "It's almost like an ongoing path with no end," says Jacobs of her work, which always begins with a pen and the line. Her open-ended approach to making art provides the viewer with a path, but not necessarily a destination, like an unfinished story we carry within ourselves.