Post by thinkspace on Dec 18, 2012 9:41:19 GMT -8
‘Project Mayhem’
Featuring new works from Dave MacDowell
Plus in our project room:
‘Perennial Winds’
Featuring new works from Dan-ah Kim
Reception with the artists:
Saturday, January 12th 6-9PM
Exhibitions on view: January 12th – February 2nd, 2013
Thinkspace is excited to kick off 2013 with Project Mayhem, the gallery’s first large scale solo exhibition of new work by New York based painter Dave MacDowell. Concurrently on view in the project room, we are honored to welcome back Dan-ah Kim with her new body of work, Perennial Winds.
Dave MacDowell's work deftly combines satire, irreverence, and seething wit. A self-taught artist, MacDowell combines popular cultural references with the magnetism of the “dark hook”, creating unexpected plays on popular culture that inject the familiar with blistering hyperboles. Seeking to unveil the feared and the reviled, while expertly weaving critical commentary with hilarity, MacDowell’s work is an effective combination of complicity and critique. Appropriately in keeping with the movement, MacDowell’s pieces combine a pop surrealist aesthetic with deliberately recognizable popular cultural references gleaned from movies, cartoons, and music, among others, and transforms the known into powerful generational odes to discontent and dystopian irony. His work combines humor with criticism and an acerbic wit, unearthing the nightmares that lurk just beneath the veneer of celebrity culture and the cult of Disney. His work fearlessly taunts the obsequiousness of popular culture, and its iconographies, by creating unexpected inversions and re-combinations that gently tug at its unravelling strings.
MacDowell’s technical execution is highly detailed and seductive, contributing to the hallucinatory pleasure and draw of the work. In keeping with the tendency of the genre, the more highly refined the execution, the more effective the irreverence of the content, and this certainly is the case with MacDowell’s paintings.The work is at times controversial and unsettling, but seems to combine contention and dissent with pleasure and whimsy. Highly accomplished at figuration and color, the artist’s work effectively conveys the vision of its hyperreality. The technicolor nightmares MacDowell offers up are at times so densely populated with imagery that they feel bottomless, like the contemporary equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch Medieval nightmare, and at other times are sparse and perfectly simple. Each piece imparts the suggestion of narrative, and reveals a story or core idea, however obliquely, that has motivated its juxtapositions and hooks. Disturbing, lascivious, and funny, each work is acuminate in its own abrupt revelations.
Take a sneak peek Dave MacDowell’s new works coming to life inside his studio here:
thinkspacegallery.com/shows/2013-01/
Artist website:
www.macdowellstudio.com
Thinkspace is pleased to present Perennial Winds, featuring new work by Brooklyn based artist Dan-ah Kim. Kim’s work is personally charged; informed by dream, personal narrative, and thematic intuition. A perfect combination of the personal and the appropriated, the artist’s work combines historical graphic and illustrative inspirations, gleaned from textile, print work, and pattern, with a revitalized sensibility owing to the creative singularity of her vision. Haunted, and delicately executed, the artist’s work offers us a glimpse into a folkloric world of her own making. The work feels simultaneously ancient and contemporary, owing to the minutiae of its detail and execution, coupled by its haunting psychological valence and graphic sensibility.
The seeming fragility of line and pattern in combination with dark graphic silhouettes, gives the work a diaphanous and fleeting quality, as though we are peering through a seamlessly woven veil of reality and reverie that could easily be dispersed and scattered at a moment’s notice. The tenuity of the mark making and patterning are exceptional, contributing to an aesthetic experience that combines delicacy with graphic clarity. The artist often incorporates textile, collage, and sewing techniques, amplifying the delicacy of the work with depth and a unique materiality. Sifting through the artist’s gossamer webs, we are left with the overwhelming feeling of an exquisite and indefinable world; itinerant, fleeting, and enigmatic. The works are moving poetic investigations of complex psychological landscapes, dexterously distilled to a perfect economy of movement, pattern, and line in the artist’s skillful hand.
Take a sneak peek at Dan-ah Kims’ new works coming to life inside her studio here:
thinkspacegallery.com/shows/2013-01-project/
Artist Website:
www.dkim-art.com