CJ Hendry didn’t grow up going to Chuck E. Cheese-style indoor playgrounds, which many 1980s and 90s kids remember as magical realms of climbing nets, slides and ball pits, with the next adventure always around the corner in a maze of colorful plastic tunnels perched high in the air.
“I’ve never been to an indoor playground before,” the artist, who built one in a warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for his latest solo show, told Artnet News.
Hendry, who grew up in Australia – where it’s called Charlie Cheese’s Pizza Playhouse, in case you were wondering – hadn’t even taken her own young children to experience the wonder that is a ball pit when she designed the exhibit. Entitled “Plaid“, the exhibition features the artist’s latest series of hyper-realistic pencil drawings, this time mimicking criss-crossing lines of colored paint reminiscent of the titular fabric variety.
The accompanying 5,000 square foot “Plaidground,” as Hendry dubbed it, is meant to echo the simple geometry of the designs, with all white floors, slides, nets and structures contrasting with the colored padding on the frames. angular.
Installation view of “Cj Hendry: Plaid”. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Hendry worked with a playground manufacturer to bring their vision to life, designing a custom structure to fit the dimensions of the space (which previously served as a his studio for three years after moving to New York in 2015). She was frustrated when the company suggested adding touches of other colors, like a bright blue slide.
“We’re like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We want everything to be white apart from the beams, and they just couldn’t understand that,” Hendry recalls, explaining that she wanted a calming effect – perhaps reminiscent, she admitted, of white walls. stuffed with the inflatable bouncy castle from its 2019 New York fashion show »Rorschach.”
The artist’s real dream would have been to design a permanent outdoor playground, Hendry said, but “Brooklyn Parks and Rec’s rigamarole could take years and years and years — I’m not that patient.”
The two-level indoor maze Hendry erected for ‘Plaid’ includes, among other features, trampolines, swings and not one but two ball pits – the larger one is filled with squishy foam cubes and has a dramatic entrance by slide.
Installation view of “Cj Hendry: Plaid”. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Just over 24 hours before the official unveiling of the exhibit, Hendry and his team were finishing up all the last-minute details on the ambitious installation, cutting the ends of tens of thousands of zip ties securing the foam padding in place. and mixing Jell-O photos for the opening reception.
Since her first exhibition in New York – at a pop-up gallery in Soho in 2017 – Hendry has embraced the trend of immersive installations, creating elaborate settings in which to experiment with her drawings. There was the aforementioned bouncy castle, the brightly colored interior design theme of “monochrome” (also in New York), and the constant stream of falling petals in “Epilogue,” held last year in a 19th-century London church.
“The space itself was extraordinary – just breathtaking. And what was special was that the church had been abandoned for about 50 years, and we renovated it, put on a beautiful exhibition and l ‘brought it back to life for the community to use,’ Hendry said.
A general view of the opening of ‘Epilogue’, the first UK solo exhibition by Brisbane-born New York artist CJ Hendry, at the New Testament Church of God in East London. Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for CJ Hendry.
The scale of this project was something she could hardly have imagined back in 2012, when Hendry posted her first drawing on Instagram. She had already dropped out of architecture school, was soon to drop out of the three-year finance bachelor’s program that was dragging into her fifth year. What remained, surprisingly, was to design, in great detail, the handbags of her day job in a Chanel store.
Hendry quickly built a following for her photorealistic drawings on Instagram, where she now has 681,000 followers. His use of social media has evolved over the past decade, especially with the platform pivoting to Reels.
“It has changed but like, you adapt to it. We just take a lot more video content,” Hendry said. “I really like making videos. I think it’s quite fun. You can tell a larger story, and there’s less room to hide behind a perfectly still, perfectly retouched image.
Cj Hendry installing drawings during his “Plaid” exhibition. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Another recent change has taken place in the artist’s personal life, as she had her first child, a son, in 2020, followed by a daughter in 2022.
“I probably work half as much as I used to, which is hard because I’m a bit of a workaholic,” Hendry admitted. “They’re just a complete delight and that really puts working 100+ hours a week into perspective. But why, who cares? You are just an artist.
Not that she’s not yet fully committed to her craft, and dedicated to finding new directions in which to push photorealism, to keep surprising the viewer.
“People are like, ‘you can just draw a landscape,’ but that doesn’t interest me,” Hendry said.
Cj Hendry completes one of the drawings for his “Plaid” exhibit. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“Plaid” was born out of a commission from a client, who asked Hendry to create a facsimile of a Elaine de Kooning work that the collector had failed to win at auction. The artist found that she loved using hyperrealism – normally used to render 3D images – into a more 2D realm.
“I really like this trickery in a way,” Hendry said. “It’s strangely harder than you think.”
The Plaid process involved painting hundreds of hashtags in different color combinations. (These preparatory works, however, are not for sale.) The palettes that Hendry deemed most successful, she translated into drawings, a process that takes hours.
“My drawing practice is really intimate. It’s beautiful, but it’s very laborious and it’s also very lonely,” she said. “Drawing, I am very close to the works, physically, while the buildings and the concepts [for my exhibitions] are so big and otherworldly that they are two completely opposite ends of the scale.
This contrast is something Hendry craves.
Installation view of “Cj Hendry: Plaid”. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“I despair of jumping and doing those big things because it allows me to be a little bit wild and creative,” Hendry added. “I think bigger and bigger, and in the drawings you can’t go that big, because you’re limited to your sheet of paper.”
The artist is already preparing her next show, her first in Paris, which she describes as “much more intimate”. It will be sometime in the fall.
Also on the horizon is Henry’s first documentary film, copyright infringement, named after his interactive art scavenger hunt of the same name. It involves fans stalking his Instagram to be the first to get their hands on a t-shirt with his designs of another artist’s copyrighted art, dropped in random places without warning.
After five successful editions, Hendry is retiring the series, but plans to launch a new project in the fall.
“I think we’ll do something similar,” she said. “It will be free, totally free, but you have to put in the money and go find them, you know. You will have to really run for it.
Cj Hendry in Copyright infringement after completing the assembly of 50 boxes for the depot in Chicago, Illinois. Photo courtesy of D’Marie Productions.
Part of the reason for “Copyright Infringement”‘s popularity was that Hendry’s online fans could rarely afford to buy his original work – the 24 “Plaid” designs cost $19,500 and $47,500 each, depending on size, and the majority were pre-sold. (There are also $750 lenticular prints, but instead of the illusion of a moving image when viewed from different directions, the artwork changes color.)
But it’s the sale of these works that helps defray the production costs of Hendry’s exhibitions, where fans can enjoy his work in person for just $10 apiece and take home a free pair of grippy plaid socks. to start. (Plus, there’s a gift shop full of loot in the $100 range.)
To date, Hendry has curated 10 solo exhibitions, all independently, with no gallery representation or museum to host, not that she is not interested in such collaborations.
Installation view of “Cj Hendry: Plaid”. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“We talk fairly regularly with the museums. But the delays are always long. It takes them years and years to plan. I would have to give up that idea for three years and move on – my practice is moving much faster than that,” Hendry said. “The next logical step is to be represented by a gallery.”
It could also simplify the logistics of staging ambitious installations like “Plaid.”
“It would be really interesting to work with a gallery,” Hendry said. “They might say, ‘we’re just going to build the thing, who cares?'”
“Cj Hendry: Plaid” performs at 220 Newel Street Greenpoint, Brooklyn, from April 14-23, 2023. Timed tickets are sold through April 16, and admission is first-come, first-served for the remainder of the show.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook:
Want to stay one step ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to receive breaking news, revealing interviews and incisive reviews that move the conversation forward.
