Finger in the Hive is a selection of nine new paintings by Haley Josephs. It is the first solo show by the artist at 315 Gallery.

Depicting various stages of life, these nine portraits read as contemporaneous yet timeless. Femininity is a repeated motif in her paintings, though the figures often move beyond the individual and depict archetypal women that transcend time and place. Notable is the surrounding environment and actions of the characters that seem to forebode an impending phenomenon.

Employing fantastical elements, Josephs suggests a world that may never be realized, or one that can only be imagined. Her paintings reveal a sensitivity to understanding the idiosyncratic nature of human experience and its multitude of emotive states.

Rendered with tenderness, the portraits turn inward, which is often symptomatic of adolescence. They reveal deep intrapsychic conflict, and consider the duality between existing in a shared external reality while simultaneously internally experiencing one’s own thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Steeped in the weight of time, the paintings become an exercise in remembrance, somewhere between the ineffable and the real. They act as a reminder that human beings are meant to feel.

Haley Josephs (b. 1987, Seattle WA) is a Brooklyn based painter. She received her BFA in Painting & Drawing from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2011, and her MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale University in 2014.