[//]

[//] was first exhibited in the artist’s 2015 solo exhibition at Greene Naftali, New York. The work is related to Humphries’s interest in the conventions of looking. As she has said, “Typically a person would stand in front of a painting to look at it, but I began to think, what if the viewer were the painting? If a painting looks out at the world, what does the painting see?”6 Wondering how to express this theoretical proposition in visual terms, Humphries decided to “make a painting and then stencil the canvas over top, as if the whole surface of the painting were inverted or flipped in on itself." To achieve this effect, Humphries used a stencil depicting the texture of woven canvas: she started by making a pencil rubbing of a section of unprimed canvas, then she scanned it, enlarged the image with the help of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator software, and programmed the resulting file into the laser cutter. Other than the black marks applied with the stencil, [//] is executed in a limited palette, characteristic of Humphries’s practice. Color appears sporadically, in opposite corners, generating a push-pull effect.