Wrapping, draping and tailoring architecture, Rachel Hayes uses environmental light, shadow, egress and access to define, color and alter our perception of interior and exterior space. For many of her site-specific works, this Brooklyn, New York-based artist chooses unabashedly synthetic materials for their ability to pop and glow with unnatural color, texture and sheen.

Within her latest installation, however, Hayes bears down upon these surfaces with a surprisingly natural found object: rocks pulled from her parent's local property. In a deft gesture, Hayes makes these unwieldy objects yield to her repertoire of materials by painting them and thus transforming them into abstract and weighty dark matter. The translucent and shiny vinyl and plastic, pulled taught and caught beneath objects foreign to her plastic world, moves her installation into a tantalizing and exciting new direction.
-Marcus Cain, curator Epsten Gallery, a project of the KC Jewish Museum Foundation, 2008