Stone House Art Gallery is pleased to present It’s All Coming Up, a solo exhibition by Kristin Hough. In her most recent series, Hough depicts screen-captured still frames from consecutive TV seasons of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and Bachelor in Paradise. Thirty paintings line the length of the gallery walls, while six more float atop a draping red velvet curtain. A ubiquitous trope becomes clear in uniting each work-- the depiction of female contestants crying on camera. 

With the inclusion of closed captioning, the women in these paintings confront viewers with their tears, sobs, and desperate pleas for reprieval of their heartache. Hough enhances these contestant’s emotional turmoil through a layered and gestural painting style. Wavering between moments reminiscent of Post-Impressionism and Fauvism, the artist contemplates the commercialization of romantic love through determined brushwork and fluctuating figural poignancy. Viewers are repeatedly confronted by women rendered anonymous in this streamlined exhibition of emotionally tormented faces. This series of paintings makes apparent the voyeurism and manipulation present in the media’s portrayal and dehumanization of women. Bodies become sites of surveillance and tears become bodily proof of authenticity. Simultaneously, through the depiction of such content via painting, the artist and viewer are faced once again with their own complicity in such voyeurism. The melodrama envisioned in this display reflects that which reality TV projects in these series.

It’s All Coming Up becomes a venue for the display of human emotion, and a token of the spectacle of consumption. It is a flagrant reminder about the commercialization of romantic love, the exploitation of women’s bodies and minds, and the creeping grip that reality TV has over American culture and politics during the last two decades and beyond.