ROMANCE
Naomi Hawksley
I’ll Affect You
Nov 7–Dec 12, 2026Press Release
In the whispered graphite drawings of New York-based artist Naomi Hawksley, even the smallest details hold something back, like the face of someone who has been crying before anyone arrived. Her anonymous young women slip through noir-ish scenes cropped like film stills, gesturing toward a story with no clear beginning or end, and Hawksley is in no hurry to tell it straight. The faces surface slowly, built from exacting strokes of gray or emerging through dappled sunlight or behind a veil of vellum. Their pale features and distant expressions look vaguely angelic until a smile reveals sharp teeth, or until a woman’s lowered gaze turns out to be looking straight back at you.
The show’s title, I’ll Affect You, sounds like something one of these women might say, though it’s hard to tell whether she means it kindly. In Untitled (Path I) (2026), a woman turns away from her counterpart, or perhaps from herself, as if wanting intimacy and refusing to be seen in the same motion. Elsewhere, figures recline so close that their limbs lace together, or jostle for the same space as though each wanted to absorb the other, and even a woman alone is waiting for someone who may already have gone.
For all their precision, the drawings register as feeling rather than description, as though rendering a person could only bring you so close to knowing her. Forms soften into erasures just as the eye arrives, and layers of vellum veil some figures like a held breath on glass. The drawings have the intimacy of a diary or sketchbook page, treated with great care but also certain duplicity. Are we lying to ourselves? Tiny raised decals bead across every image like condensation, trailing past the edges onto the mattes, until the plastic quietly gives the artifice away and what looked like genuine tears becomes a kind of composition, a self-assembled the way an image is, by a narrator who may not be telling us everything.
That duplicity sharpens in Untitled (Alley) (2026), which breaks from the rest of the work by flattening a kissing couple into silhouettes against a brick wall. In the foreground, a ghost of a woman, rendered in a thick layer of graphite, watches them, her grin unrepentant and sinister but for the innocent barrette in her hair. As in much of her work, the drawing hints at the hidden social structures through which morality and ethics, shame and shadow-sides and desires to belong often exist together. The face in Untitled (Terrace) (2026) seemingly wants to be perceived, pressing close behind a window with her mouth pulled into a grimace while the droplets accumulate on the glass, obscuring a clear view. On a second look, the decals line up into words: can you see me?
Naomi Hawksley (b. 2000, San Francisco, CA; lives and works in New York) has presented solo exhibitions at Bibeau Krueger, New York (2024); Bio Gallery, Seoul (2024); and SULK, Chicago (2023). Recent group exhibitions include rehearsal, hardboiled, Chicago (2025); No Hard Feelings, ay ay ay, Offenbach, Germany (2025); we know nothing about people who don’t cry, Romance, Pittsburgh (2025); Real World, White Noise, Seoul (2024); Body Profile, Faction, Seoul (2024); and Inherited Division: Second Hand Planet, Southern Exposure, San Francisco (2018). Hawksley’s work has been featured in Artforum Artguide, ArtReview, and Visla Magazine. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022, was an artist in residence at White Noise, Seoul, from 2023–24, and participated in Flower Residency, Los Angeles, in 2026.