ALREADY
NANCY ZASTUDIL ART DIRECTOR, WRITER, AND CURATOR LIVING IN ABQ
My images are not new. I did not really invent them. It is as if they were already there. — HENNI ALFTAN
Four peach-hued bare feet, the movements of which are superimposed, make their way through the gray ground of five different compositions. Each planted foot casts an oval shadow, and the angled calves, tipped toes, and lifted heels indicate a slight bend in the knees, a shifting and shuffling of weight happening just outside our view. We glimpse the bottom hem of olive green pants, merely above the ankles, a fabric checkered by dark lines. The scene is at once active and quiet, familiar but truncated.
A technique used in cinema is to show as little as possible in order to appeal to the imagination, juste au-delà, meaning “just beyond.” Henni Alftan’s pictures, as she calls them, such as the seven-color lithograph Dancing, I-V (2021) described above, show us everything by limiting what we see: we are keenly aware of the presence of an absence. We owe our affinity for this tableau—our ability to psychically complete the picture—to our lived experiences, including the myriad of images we have already seen.
Alftan recently extended her interest in active looking to the medium of printmaking, embracing the process of collaborative lithography during her 2021 Frederick Hammersley Artist Residency at Tamarind Institute. Not wanting any of her solutions to become automatic, she created three new editions, of which Dancing is one. The residency was an opportunity for building pictures that, she says, wouldn’t make sense to create in painting but that lend themselves to printmaking.1
2021 FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY ARTIST RESIDENCY
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