NEW YORK, NY.- On view until January 18, 2025, this is the artist’s first solo presentation in Southern California, showcasing six of her largest works to date, each measuring eight by six feet, along with two new, intimately scaled, multi-part nipple paintings. Overview Effect follows Hollowell’s solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut—her first museum survey and first museum presentation on the East Coast, now on view at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art through March 9, 2025—and her recent show at Pace’s New York gallery, Dilation Stage.

Her exhibition in LA takes its title from what astronauts describe as the “overview effect”—the experience of seeing Earth from space. From that vantage point, the planet becomes a unified whole without borders or boundaries, a single system of which humanity is a tiny part.

In her new Overview Effect paintings, Hollowell gives viewers a bold first impression: searing our retinas with the force of bright color, extreme lighting, symmetry, and strong geometries that take on larger-than-life proportions. Stare for a while, and you will feel the paintings’ lasting effects as afterimages linger over your field of vision and leave a psychic mark. The limited palette in this body of work, based on primary colors and their combinations, suggests something basic and elemental floating in the cosmic soup.

But looking longer and closer, something else happens—a tension between strict compositional order and localized mark-making, between overall tightness and areas of looseness, between mathematical precision and hand-painted, jumbled chaos. The dynamic between these contradictory aspects is complex, with stability containing instability, symmetry and geometry emerging from entropy. This rapport between the overview effect and the works’ up-close details depends on proximity. What appear from a distance as luminous orbs, celestial bodies, and blended colors shift into new focus as tangles of swirling, frenetic lines that imply hidden dimensions zip through our own frequencies and pass undetected through this field of existence.

Hollowell’s twisted, kinky mark-making captures states and sensations of heightened energy. The calligraphic looping of her lines implies a deeper relationship with writing and communication, reminding us that the primary aim of her aesthetic project is to record a subjective, bodily experience of feeling.

The Overview Effect paintings depict two identically sized orbs stacked vertically with concentric ripples that intersect to form a horizontal mandorla. Here, Hollowell uses abstraction to capture the brief moments and breaks between contractions during childbirth, which can be a simultaneously out-of-body experience and a thoroughly visceral, embodied one. In each of these paintings, one orb bulges out while the other is a cavity—they could nest inside one another, like a hand or mouth cupped over a breast or like a child filling a pregnant mother’s belly.

In the gallery’s adjacent space, Hollowell exhibits her rainbow suite of 16 small paintings, her smallest works to date, each spiked near the top with a protruding nipple cast from the bodies of her breastfeeding friends. Titled Spectrum XVI (an invocation of Ellsworth Kelly’s monumental Spectrum V) and spanning the full spectrum of color— from blue to green, yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, and back to blue—this multi-part work is an exercise in both smooth transitions and stark contrast. A “milking line” drops straight down from each raised nipple, sharply delineating a bright highlight on the left and a dark shadow on the right. A fold, a crease, a pleat, a peak: the nipple designates a dividing line and a kind of crucible of intense chroma. The plumb line conjures the glowing, revolving arm of a radar map while connoting the time-keeping function and cyclicality of a sundial. As in the Overview Effect paintings, Hollowell’s technical prowess produces confusing and captivating trompe-l’oeil illusions that both hyperbolize and complicate real dimensionality.

The juxtaposition of these groups of paintings in Hollowell’s presentation in LA underscores her interest in shifting scales, from the micro to the macro and back again, from deep within oneself to far beyond it.