calendario eventi  :: 

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5/1/2005

Two exhibitions

Littlejohn Contemporary, New York

Gallery I: Laurie Hogin “Field Guide”, Jan.6 - Feb.12, 2005
Project Room: Katie Niewodowski “Option”, An installation; Jan. 6 - Feb.5, 2005

Gallery I:
Laurie Hogin
“Field Guide”
New painting

Laurie Hogin's most recent body of work, titled "Field Guide", opens at Littlejohn Contemporary on January 6th, 2005. It includes several sets or series of paintings and sculptural works that refer to the taxonomic impulse--the desire to organize the overwhelming variety of nature by means of classification systems for naming and identification. Ms. Hogin's morphologically generic migratory songbirds, fashion-model monkeys, neon-hued amphibians and reptiles, and fungus specimens are represented in a narrow variety of historical styles, from loose, painterly flourishes to a tight, almost illustrational style that might have been used by an artist-naturalist of the late 19th century. Other paintings use compositional and narrative motifs to refer to fashion or product photography and are intended to be digitalized for distribution as photographic reproductions or on the Internet, while cast-resin botanical specimens mimic both natural history and retail display. Hogin's allegorical animal and plant species sport the colors of our globalized economy, from the day-glow hues of package design to the pixilated palettes of television and Internet, as well as the colors of nationalist identity and political affiliation; an imagined nature's literal embodiment of contemporary conditions. Color functions as a metaphor for the taxonomies of the global marketplace, where it is both seduction and signage, and the comfortable rectangles through which we are accustomed to viewing the world--paintings, photographs, television screens and now computer monitors--contain a dazzling array of "specimens" from across the globe, separated from their histories and brought together for a new narrative of a "natural" world.

Laurie Hogin splits her time between Chicago, New York and her studio in rural Mahomet, Illinois. She is Associate Professor and Chair of the Painting and Sculpture program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has an extensive national exhibition record and is represented in numerous private and public collections throughout the country. This is the artist’s fourth exhibition at Littlejohn Contemporary.

In The Project Room:
Katie Niewodowski
“Option” : an installation

Littlejohn Contemporary is pleased to present an installation of sculptural work by Katie Nieodowski in the Project Room. This body of work stems from the artist’s inclination to make artwork that keeps her in frequent contact with her process and to explore particular forms and their meaning. Rolling “sculpey” balls became a means of engaging in this activity on a methodical basis. At first, these acrylic-based sculpey balls were just a translucent cream color, as she wanted them to refer to the body or to single cells, particularly eggs. The artist then added an array of colors and eventually black, alluding to the metastasis of such cells.

Niewodoski is fascinated with the paradox of the cancer cell and the healthy human egg. Both have the potential for extraordinary growth. Yet while the cancer cell grows, it simultaneously destroys. She explores this in her work with the generation and seeming degeneration of thousands of balls that grow like cancer threading them on nearly invisible filaments which are suspended around the room. The affect is a disappearance and reappearance of the bead-like structures that are at once becoming and unattractive. The shadow play on the wall adds to this ephemeral quality of the installation.

“Options” is an entranceway into the fascinating and troubling world of these biomorphic connections. One can be surrounded in a room of seemingly playful mobile forms. Their intricacies will invite the viewer to explore the minute and at times, repulsing detail. The structures seem to pustulate and grow like a mold. They also alternate between conditions of the organic and the artificial. The play of fishing line and puffy paint in tangles around the individually-rolled sculpey balls brings the viewer back to the materiality and process of the work.

Ms. Niewodowski is currently working on her Masters degree at the Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ. Her undergraduate studies were completed at the Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, FL, and the Florida State University, Jacksonville, FL. This is her first exhibition in New York.

Image: a work by Laurie Hogin

Littlejohn Contemporary
41 East 57 Street
New York, New York 10022

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