Juxtapoz Magazine - Amy Winstanley: Life Hum @ Margot Samel, New York

"Life Hum refers to the constant humming movement of all matter, from a social to a molecular level. In each painting, through every moment, life is jittering, fluctuating, wavering, vibrating, and oscillating. Winstanley merges an improvisational, intuitive, and observant practice, with a kind of essayistic way of building bodies of work, painting across multiple canvases at once to allow some to become more figurative-thesis-like-and others to sit within their textures and abstractions."

"Specific works even appear to echo each other, acting like modifiers or prepositions through their compositions like in We Want to be Useful, and Kind, 2025, and While We Wait, and Fruit, 2025. This method stresses an interconnected-ness that Winstanley is invested in while the whole exhibition mimics broader synchronistic choreographies of life. The present is a resonance of everything that was and everything that will be; it is a kind of constant, multi-layered, always unfolding, messy middle ground."

"The artist often works closely with literary references while in the studio. For this body of work, she pulls from writer Bayo Akomolafe's, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, which consists of a series of philosophical letters to the writer's daughter on the comings and goings of living today. The motifs, palettes, and subjects that emerge in Winstanley's paintings are in part inspired by his circular views of time, and act like conductive tuning forks which place Winstanley within life hum."

Amy Winstanley's Life Hum exhibition presents paintings that capture the constant humming movement of matter from social to molecular scales. Each canvas depicts life as jittering, fluctuating, wavering, vibrating, and oscillating. Winstanley combines improvisational, intuitive observation with an essayistic method, painting across multiple canvases so some become figurative while others remain textural and abstract. Works echo and modify one another to stress interconnectedness and mimic synchronistic choreographies of life. The present is portrayed as a resonance of past and future, a multi-layered, always unfolding messy middle. The series draws from Bayo Akomolafe's circular views of time and memory.

Read at Juxtapoz