Text from 'The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night' at MASS MoCA:

Josephine Halvorson works en plein air, making paintings out in the world in locations that have included northern California,
Tennessee, and Iceland (she travels with a portable French easel). She notes that she is usually within an arm's length from the objects that she chooses to paint, which range from defunct mining equipment in Death Valley to the trees she encounters on her walks in the Berkshires where her studio is based. Her sensitive observations produce images that are full of detail-exacting likenesses-that draw attention to the subtleties that we often overlook and hint at what she describes as
"the invisible yet perceptible feelings in the physical world."

The artist created her "Night Window" works during a residency at the French Academy at the Villa Medici in Rome between 2014 and 2015. Each painting is an iteration of a single view of the window in her atelier and the night sky beyond. Working in series for the first time, the artist painted each work over the course of a single night, and despite their similarities, each is different. The gray-green hue of the window frame varies from canvas to canvas--perhaps with shifts in light-as do the position of the nails, evidence of the subjectivity and personal perceptions inherent to even the most direct of representations. The paintings are titled with the date on which they were painted, a reminder that each is a unique portrait of a particular experience. Together they provide a study of time and a record of the incremental changes in the night sky. Halvorson commented that to paint a view of Rome under the cloak of darkness is perhaps a response to the psychological weight of such an undertaking -when the likes of Ingres may have painted from that very same Villa Medici apartment. Ingres and others surely must have also pondered a similar night sky. Like the night itself, Halvorson's "Night Windows" captures the intimate and universal at once.