Expensive Attention: The Slow Looking Tradition in Art
In a moment where visual culture is driven by speed—by—swipe, scroll, algorithm, and spectacle, Expensive Attention invites viewers to slow down. To look again. To listen, materially, to what art, and painting specifically, can still do. Across four gallery spaces at the Saint Kate-the Arts Hotel, this exhibition brings together artists working in direct opposition to a distracted age. These works are not made to keep up; they are made to linger on in our imaginations.
Featuring monotypes by Olivia Hiester, an immersive installation by Blake O’Brien, sumi ink drawings by Francie Cook, and a film by Nick Cajori, this cycle also includes the group show Imagined Landscapes, with paintings by Tucker Love, Liam Murphy-Torres, and Sutton Allen. Together, these artists share a commitment to making slow, thoughtful, embodied work—painting against the tide of quick content and digital sheen.
Attention is the medium in this cycle of shows. Materials matter: oil paint, ink, paper, wood, and cloth. These are works with weight. You can almost feel the residue of the turpentine and smell the linseed oil. The surfaces are not flat screens—they're built up, scraped down, lived with. The image isn’t delivered; it’s uncovered, worked for, hard-won. Across figuration and abstraction, installation and cinema, these artists ask something rare of us: presence. Not just to see the work, but to meet it. To take time. To sit with what doesn’t explain itself right away. Because when information is cheap, attention is expensive.
Now and Again
by Olivia Hiester
In Now and Again, Olivia Hiester explores the poetics of the monotype—a process known for its singularity and spontaneity, where each image is printed only once. When a painted plate is run through the press a second time, it yields a “ghost” print: a fainter, more ethereal and often unpredictable version of the first impression. In this exhibition, both states are on view. On the ground floor of The Space, Hiester presents
a series of primary monotypes—direct, bold, and rich with painterly gesture. Upstairs, in a quieter second-floor alcove, their ghosts appear: softer, more diffuse, like a dream or a memory held at a distance. Hiester’s imagery hovers between abstraction and figuration, surface and depth. Limbs, torsos, fruits, and flowers dissolve into the atmosphere, flickering in and out of view. Each print becomes a meditation on presence—what remains, what fades, and what returns, if only briefly.
Olivia Hiester is a painter and printmaker living and working in her native city of Philadelphia, PA. She graduated with a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she was a recipient of the James J. and Frances M. Maguire Artistic Excellence Scholarship and the Raymond and Estelle Rubens Travel Scholarship. She has attended the Mount Gretna School of Art’s summer intensive program three times and was awarded the Lois and Charles X. Carlson Landscape Painting Residency in 2023. She holds a Barnes-De Mazia Certificate from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, PA. In 2024, she received a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.
