All of a Sudden
Galería Mascota is proud to present All of a Sudden, a group exhibition showcasing a selection of works by 21 interdisciplinary artists in an effort to contemplate material as a matrix for creation. Through a lens that understands making and generating as an important beginning of thought and life, this group show attempts to focus on the material aspect of the work as an encouraging and nurturing vessel that facilitates a connection with what was and what will be.
Within the wide range of materials selected by the artists forming part of this exhibition, the works seem to whisper to each other, engaging in a conversation about creation. An old school canon of Art History is that the material of choice must be manipulated by the artist to become as close to reality as possible, any evidence of the process must almost be erased from the final product, allowing for a certain myth of creation. However, when the barrier of this myth is broken and the apparatus of making is unveiled to the viewer, then material can be understood not only as a tool to create visual compositions but also as a map to the entire cosmology of the artist and their work. Material can be folklore, sound, writing, coding, observing, interviewing, archiving, but the deep personal knowledge that comes from the true exploration of a medium is what leads to the creation of different universes. Going beyond the expression of a line or the imprint of a movement on a canvas, there is something that lies beyond the evidence of the artistic act. There is a silent knowing in the turning of useful materials into something different, something further away. There is a knowing that goes beyond material, which is the drive of creation.
In a time of online reproduction, the physical presence of material has become crucial. There is a divide between materiality and immateriality, the material force of a work of art evokes a knowing in the viewer that allows interpretation and the projection of their own identity. But the immaterial aspect is what resonates with something outside our senses. This side of immateriality is where we can find the unseen parts of ourselves. A resonance with immateriality that might be all that is left after art.
Mai Thu Perret (b.1976) Known for her multidisciplinary practice that engages feminist politics, literary texts and homemade crafts, alongside a range of 20th century avant-garde and radical art movements, Mai Thu Perrets work encourages a discourse on the intersections of different aspects of the human experience that make an important commentary on something that has traveled through time and exists within, beyond simple interpretation.
William Anastasi (b. 1933) An american painter and visual artist, which has lived and worked in New York since the early 1960s. His work is predominantly abstract and conceptual, and incorporates sometimes construction materials. His Babad series, which draws on James Joyce´s thunderwords, is profoundly onomatopoeic in nature and functions as a meditation on the nature of speaking and invention of language. Using literary admiration as the core material of the works, the ongoing process of his creation is combined with his own artistic tendencies as evidence of the humanity of the creative drive.
Dike Blair (b. 1952) began his pictures of quotidian (mostly)-American scenes in the 1980s. Working in oil and gouache, Blair’s photorealistic tableaus emanates from his own photographs. Capturing the transformation of an image through different stages of material with a sensitive attention to the ordinary that is both romantic and ironic. A modern-day flâneur, capturing the unexceptional observations of a day.
Dove Bradshaw (b. 1949) pioneered the use of Indeterminacy in 1969 by enlisting the unpredictable effects of time, weather, erosion, and indoor and outdoor atmospheric conditions on natural, chemical, and manufactured materials. She has created chemical paintings that change with the atmosphere; indoor erosion sculptures of salt and outdoor stone sculptures that weather. She has worked with crystals that receive radio transmissions from local, short wave, and weather stations, along with reception of radio telescope signals from Jupiter.
Andre Butzer (b. 1973) Andre Butzers work is characterized by an intensive exploration of the limits and possibilities of the medium of painting, allowing the artist to develop a strong personal universe that can be accessed by the viewer through his deep insights and capabilities within the medium he is using as a tool. Initially creating expressive pictures of intense colours, marked by an artificially exaggerated reality, his works are energetic and portray an elaborated contrast of pictorial means.
Talia Chetrit (b. 1982) in Washington D.C. Talia lives and works in NYC showcasing the evidence of creation through photography and allowing the process to become the true subject of her work. By disclosing the apparatus of photography to the viewer, her images open another layer in the work that permits an open conversation about the production of images and the meaningful myth of artistry.
Jake Clark A Melbourne based graffiti artist who uses a variety of materials to subversively depict iconic pop culture characters and landmark destinations. Best known for his Richie Rich and Sultan characters, Jake centers his work around the themes of money, power, and capitalism. By handling the rawness of the medium he works with through a comical approach, ceramic becomes the vessel by which his message of post modern absurdity is delivered.
Lucy Dodd (b. 1981) By making connections between art and life through a spiritual exploration of materials, Lucy Dodd´s work invokes art historical and mythological symbolism. Her materials include natural pigments such as crystals, azurite, carmine, and squid pigments, but also plant-based substances such as black walnut, avocado skins, kombucha scoby, and matcha tea that we ingest as part of our own organism. This exploration of material becomes almost ritualistic in her work, embodying a special type of magic that comes from the interaction between ritual and materiality.
Hadi Fallahpisheh (b. 1987) Born in Tehran, Hadi works primarily with photography, as well as performance and installation to destabilize visions of a stable singular subject. His work reveals gaps between experiences that might be perceived between the public and the personal. Most of his work is created in the dark, using the process of photography in innovative ways that leave behind imprints that use the process of making as a vessel for expressing intrigues about creation.
Marie Hazard (b. 1994) Is a French artist who lives and works in London. Her work is based around the exploration of fabrics, thread and weaving as the main material of her creations. Forming unusual shapes while also developing an exploration of color and sometimes implementing foreign substances like pastels or ink, her work resonates with the beginning of materiality and how its exploration led to the human desire to create.
Evan Holloway (b. 1967) The sculptural work of Evan Holloway is based on his belief in the simple and fundamental transactions between people and objects. This also means that his sculptures are not just abstractions or decorations, but are to be understood as a commentary on contemporary society and its values.
Brook Hsu (b. 1987) Lives and works in New York. Hsu received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. With the physician presence of Material being crucial to her work, Brook Hsu creates intense compositions centered around the material and the mythology evoked by creation.
Kazuo Kadonaga (b. 1946) descends from a forestry family, yet chose instead to pursue creative endeavors in the late 1960s. Initially he explored painting, but in the early 1970s, Kadonaga eschewed the personal, artistic expression of his own hand, opting to examine processes which allow for his chosen materials to become their own self-representing subjects. In his work, Kadonaga reorganizes the natural order of materials in order for them to acquire new meaning as well as to call attention to their inherent qualities. Due to this approach, weather and atmospheric changes become his most important tools: he fights with materials that are particularly susceptible to unpredictable environments and cheerfully recognizes chance.
Wyatt Khan Wyatt Kahn is primarily known for his investigations into the visual and spatial relationship between painting and sculpture. Using unprimed canvases stretched over wooden frames, Kahn assembles complex wall-mounted works in which the gaps between the individual canvases give rise to abstract or pictorial compositions. Rather than tracing the lines and shapes directly onto the canvas itself, he turns them into physical components of the artwork.
Michael Ross (b.1955) For the past twenty years Michael has had direct his focus toward small, precise wall mounted sculptures created from scraps, unidentifiable hardware and miscellaneous things. Michael Ross’s earliest small-scale sculpture consisted of a single upright thimble containing the dust from several rooms of his home. Due to their small scale the works highlight the selection of materials and the importance they may convey no matter the scale of the final work.
SANGREE A Mexico City–based collaboration between René Godínez-Pozas (b. 1986) and Carlos Lara (b. 1985), SANGREE has developed over the year through the deep exploration of the most puzzling subjects of human history through images made by artists. With a continuous expansion, their archive becomes the material that sustains the works and is regarded as a pool of ideas from which different projects may emerge.
Dan McCarthy McCarthy’s ceramics are intentionally low-tech, simple and direct. His tools are minimal – ice lolly sticks, forks, spoons – with a process that favours touch; and what drives him is the emotionally intuitive handling of wet, heavy clay that is constantly in a state of drying out, instinctively working this material into shapes with a ‘sense of immediacy and buoyant spirit’.
Adam McGowan McGowan’s works are composed forms fabricated from wood, glue, screws and gouache that begin as simple preparatory drawings in a squared notebook. There is a nurtured inwardness to the works that suggests an earned familiarity with the history of their medium. They are modest and plainspoken, yet their scale has an arresting quality that dramatically punctuates the wall. They are durable and vulnerable, covered and exposed, full of contradictions that play a part in manipulating the attention of the viewer.
Mohammed Namou (b. 1987) Mohammed is an Algerian born French artist living and working in Paris where he is completing his studies at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux- Arts. His current researches are based on a study of the various aspects of an image, tracing out its sources, from the concept to its concrete visibility. He expresses a duality through the use of material that is unveiled through the use of detail, allowing his work to express a procedural multiplicity.
Alessandro Teoldi (b. 1987) Traversing between the use of different material, his work is often formulated by the experimentation of a medium. The transformation of mass-produced materials into
representations corporeal elements that are easily recognizable, allow a seductive quality to come through this use of imagery into which the viewer can project intimacy and familiarity despite of the synthetic qualities of the original material.
Blair Thurman (b.1961) Marked by the likes Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Steve Parrino, Blair Thurman participates in a dialogue about the limits of image-making. His influences range from Pop Art and Minimalism to childhood relics, popular music and the cinema of the seventies. Thurman appropriates the inheritance of abstraction in a free and eclectic way, combining a personal iconography with the inherent challenges of painting, which results in multidimensional pieces.