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