Pia Howell’s new series of C-prints, Hollywood Rd., was created for Picture Room using her signature color darkroom process. The body of work, which blurs the lines between painting, photography, and printmaking, references Hong Kong’s antiques market of the same name. Drawing inspiration from classical eastern and western elements, Howell uses a visual language of universally relatable iconography. To create her prints, Howell paints directly on to transparencies, then contact-prints onto photo paper by exposing the paper to color-filtered light in the darkroom. The resulting prints have a simplicity of form that deviates fluidly between abstraction and representation and renders the familiar unfamiliar.
Pia Howell, b. 1986, is an American artist. Following her studies at Columbia University and Rhode Island School of Design, she now lives and works in New York.
Sep 24th 2015