hen looking at the works in , a viewer should bear in mind that for Pat Hoffie, there is a reciprocity between visual and ethical discernment. That is, what we look at in art influences our orientation to our world, and what images do in the world matters. In much of Hoffie’s work, she has interrogated the terms of everyday existence, the newest, large works’ focus on certainty has softened, even as their visual drama is ramped up. In provoking a sensation of shock and awe, these teeming landscapes entangle normal life with epic, symbolic, brawling babels of humans (teens, mums, children, soldiers) and nonhumans (trees, tsunamis, manga characters, totems, bunnies, bombs). What we see in the paintings are allegorical multiverses proffering no easy identification, or resolution, of guilt and innocence. Far from it: in several of these works, as intense conflicts swarm, mobile phone distraction proliferates. To my mind, many of the relaxed, sauntering human figures in paintings such as (2018), and (2018), though surrounded by war, pollution, or an impending tsunami, could sport thought bubbles over their heads, saying, “Anyway, what can one person do”? Hoffie suggests that an ethics of truly seeing what’s in plain sight too regularly succumbs to the seductions of the selfie or the screen.
