Cheryl Humphreys is a visual artist based in Los Angeles who works in printed matter, specifically paper to create embossed and printed color fields that reverberate and hypnotize. Using handmade materials and an impeccable eye for color, she creates evocative monoprints with blind embossings on a 500-pound press in her home studio. Her meticulous patterns and intuitive shifts in hue communicate sensorial experiences while challenging assumptions about the permanence of perception.
Humphreys’ subtly shifting colors and elliptical topographies generate a sensory experience and a serenity in her viewers. Through her equally experimental and meticulous strategies. Scholar Blair Taylor has characterized Humphrey’s process in writing: “As with The Bauhaus’ geometric colorists, Rothko’s liminal spiritualism, or the 1970s architect of light, James Turrell, Humphreys identifies perception itself as material. Printmaking is usually highly methodical and ritualistic, and it is absolutely so in Humphreys’ hands. Through repetition, the human body and mind drop into a more relaxed state; Humphreys builds this into her works like so much respite. Repetition also emphasizes the inextricable interrelatedness of color, texture, shape and scale. As the artist’s compositions shift in hue or size, the forms and textures within them shift too, not unlike the ocean does, naturally, upon entering a cove. Like her aesthetic forbear, Josef Albers, Humphreys’ artwork is influenced by her design work. This interweaving of traditions generates synesthesia-like experience in viewers, whose minds and bodies are uniquely and simultaneously engaged.”
Humphreys was born in 1986 in Ithaca, NY, and received her BFA from Otis College of Art & Design in 2008. She has attended residencies at Otra Vox, Los Angeles, CA and Pocoapoco, Oaxaca, Mexico and has solo exhibitions at Sarah Brook Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Otra Vox, Los Angeles, CA; and Paul Loya Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Group exhibitions include the Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA; Ace Hotel, Brooklyn, NY; and other spaces locally and internationally. Humphreys currently lives and works in Los Angeles.