TWICE BITTEN Featuring Alexandra Haeseker & Davida Kidd  February 16 – April 6, 2019   Opening Reception & Royal High Tea - 2-5 PM, Saturday, February 16, 2019

What we see and believe to be real is often a pact between social mores and individual perception. Brought up to understand the world as a set of circumstances that can be trusted to be secure, is of course necessary to maintain an order that encourages positive participation. What the eye sees, depends upon what we have been coached to see.  What we believe, depends upon what we have been coached to believe. With the advent of technological skills that are as handy as a cell phone, or computer images that can be manipulated to the extent that the original content is skewed or even falsified altogether, a sense of unbalance results. An alteration in perception can refresh the take on subject matter or it can undermine it. It can also work to enchant or challenge with the option to succumb to the new apparition or be challenged by it, which may in turn cause an impetus towards investigation. Alexandra Haeseker’s shaped printed panels register as having a photo-based origin: what is seen is hard to recognize as anything from reality. The colors are seductive, often brilliant and acidic. The forms within the cut-out silhouettes appear to have been reconstructed, overtly saturated. These vestiges of manipulation give a foot-hold into the work; but still there is a puzzling sensation that there is something more resonating than has been discovered, that there is more evidence of the human in these shapes than is discerned at first glance. Davida Kidd conversely doesn’t hide what is seen so much as reveals what we might not have considered as connections between the subject matters. Often within an intense or ominous contextualization, there are visual clues that point in the direction of narrative but leave an openness that allows for individual interpretation on the part of the viewer. The subject matter is familiar. There are people and things for which we have names, definitions and contexts, but she sets up scenes where the order is slightly off, the tempo syncopated, the words of visual phrases rearranged. The ground is precipitous, precarious, but as if in high alert, the consciousness inclines towards a super awareness over and above the usual call to be present. TWICE BITTEN is an invitation to the cautionary tale that lies between the experience of memory and consequent apprehensions that stir in the heart of both artists’ studio research. Both Davida Kidd and Alexandra Haeseker will be in attendance at Headbones Gallery’s opening reception for TWICE BITTEN on Saturday, February 16 from 2 - 5 PM. We will be celebrating with a Royal High Tea and invite you to drop in.