Lost Love opens at Art Hospital

Artists Cindy Hinant and Greg Ajamie’s ‘Lost Love’ and ‘Paper Cuts’ art shows premiered Friday at the Art Hospital with a reception of music, drinks and thousands of hand-cut paper hearts.

Each show was a display of installation art in the form of small, individually cut paper hearts. Hinant, working from a single drawing of a simple white heart, created thousands of re-sized copies which she then cut out and mounted to foam-core backing.  ‘Lost Love’ is the accumulation of all of those hearts, arranged in a graceful explosion across the walls.

“The hearts have a general movement that they maintain,” Hinant said. “They’re inspired in part by matter that has an organic magnetism, like bubbles in a bathtub or flocks of birds – things that are going to organically collect and dissipate.”

Each time ‘Lost Love’ appears in a gallery space, the hearts take on a different shape. At the Art Hospital, they encircle the viewer on four walls of their small gallery space.

“The density and formation is created in the gallery,” Hinant said. “I knew I wanted to do something really dense (at the Art Hospital) because it’s such a small space.”

Regardless of the groupings the hearts take on in the gallery space, they are not meant to have a saddening effect on the viewer.

“The idea of ‘Lost Love’ is that when you have a crush on someone and it’s not reciprocated, instead of disappearing or breaking, these hearts are creating these imaginary spaces,” Hinant said.

‘Paper Cuts’ began in 2006 as a project between Hinant, Ajamie and their families when they began cutting hearts together at gatherings. Now the hearts are amassed on the Art Hospital’s walls in the shape of two oversized scissors, representative of both violence and affection.

“This piece is not necessarily a ‘heart in love’ shape,” Hinant said. “It’s that fine line between love and hate.  We’ve made a volcano out of them, we’ve done two big hearts made of small hearts and we’ve done scissors and knives. When we came into the space, we weren’t sure what we were doing, and we decided that this is what we wanted.”

Art Hospital Treasurer Will Claytor agrees that the final shapes Hinant and Ajamie chose were perfect for the studio space.

“The collective of artists who work in and run the space go through (exhibit possibilities), whittle them down to the ideas that we think best match the quality and aesthetic that we’re going for, and then see if we can work out the scheduling,” said
Claytor. “I think we were all really attracted to Cindy’s work – it uses the space in a way no one else has.”

Hinant’s work was met with impressed stares from guests viewing the opening of the exhibit as they walked through the door frame into an inundation of thousands of hearts.   

“I will say that I personally enjoy it when artists find a unique way to present the artwork that they have labored so long over,” Art Hospital Vice President Mark Rice said. “To interact with the exhibition space that they are presented, and to not have the installation of the show be the final, static and therefore last-minute afterthought of the exhibition.”