Kristin Hough (Art) recently opened her solo exhibition "Time Out For Tears" at the Whitney Library. Time Out For Tears is an exhibition of paintings based on still frames from consecutive seasons of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise. The work focuses on a ubiquitous trope in reality TV — female contestants crying on camera. As the viewer moves through the room, they are confronted over and over with an onslaught of tears, sobs and weeping women — much like the promotional videos filled with smash cuts of emotion that the paintings are based on. The work forces the viewer and artist to be complicit in the show’s voyeurism and manipulation, where women’s bodies are sites of surveillance and tears become bodily proof of authenticity. The exhibition space becomes a venue for the display of human emotion and a document of the spectacle of consumption. The work contemplates the commercialization of romantic love, the exploitation of women's bodies and mental state and the creeping grip reality TV has taken on American culture and
politics over the last two decades.