Chuck Feesago: This is Samoan Art

For Immediate Release:

Chuck Feesago: This is Samoan Art

Exhibition runs from May 3- June 4

Artist Reception- Friday May 20, 2011 from 6-9pm

House Gallery

29 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

www.housegalleryslc.com

House Gallery will be closed from May 10- May 17

House Gallery is pleased to present This is Samoan Art, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Chuck Feesago. A meditation on convergences and separations, the exhibition opens on May 3rd and continues through June 4th. An artist’s reception will be held on May 20th from 6-9 PM.

Chuck Feesago’s mixed media works, rhythmic, repetitive and yet strangely renegade in their approach to material, each offer a ritualistic sense of wholeness. But wholeness is deceptive, Feesago suggests. Motivated by the ways in which the cultural tropes of the Pacific Islands merge and overlap with tropes specific to the U.S., the artist has used relatively simple but still culturally loaded patterns and shapes to explore sameness and differences, inclusions and omissions.

Either made of squares woven out of string, acrylic and paper or from round coffee filters on paper mounted on wood, the works in This is Samoan Art are neither authentically Samoan nor purporting to be. Instead, they consider whether hybridity and authenticity can coexist peaceably. Despite the fact that they ask fairly contemporary questions, they have a certain timelessness to them, the kind often associated with traditional craft and tribal design. Circles and squares in the past, art associated with the Pacific has tended to be about the Pacific and not of it. The Pacific of the 19th century saw painters like Nicholas Chevalier and, most famously, Paul Gaugin set up camp on what they considered exotic shores, like those of Tahiti and Samoa, and bring these shores to the attention of the art-viewing West. Even within recent decades, non-natives like New Zealand painter Nigel Brown have become better known for their representations of the Pacific than any islanders themselves.

Feesago, well aware of the army of outsiders associated with Pacific art, does not endeavor to represent Samoa or its neighbors at all. He’s far more interested in the process of making objects in one place that have been influenced by another, and the way weaving materials in and out of each other resembles the way cultures and traditions migrate, spread and become enmeshed.

More in line with artists like Kiki Smith or Mark Bradford, makers who understand the metaphorical potential of process, than with those who dabble in cultural anthology, the sensibility Feesago brings to This is Samoan Art has to do with work ethic and intuition. It’s about gut trusting, fusion and reverence for cultures far and near. This reverence manifests most compellingly in Feesago’s refusal to make art that is anything other than art—material brought together via the hand of an artist fascinated by the way rituals from far-away but vital regions can spread and leak into the culture that surrounds him in the here and now.

Feesago holds an M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University and a B.A. from University of California-Irvine. He has exhibited at Offramp Gallery in Pasadena, University of La Verne’s West Gallery, and the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery, among other venues.

- Catherine Wagley

Amy Lincoln- Through the Window

For Immediate Release:

Amy Lincoln: Through the Window

House Gallery

29 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

801-910-1731

www.housegalleryslc.com

Dates: April 5- April 30

Artist Reception: Friday April 15, 6-9pm

House Gallery is pleased to present Through the Window, an exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist Amy Lincoln. This is Lincoln’s first solo show with the gallery, and the first time her work will appear in Salt Lake City. Through the Window opens April 5th and continues through April 30th. An artist’s reception will be held on April 15th, from 6-9 PM.

Contemplative to an extreme, each of Lincoln’s paintings depicts a view of the inside of the artist’s apartment, equating tangible interior space with the less tangible interior of the subconscious. Intimately sized and carefully composed, the paintings have an illustrative quality that resonates with the more sophisticated of graphic novels—Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi come to mind—but they also have an intentional seriousness, channeling the inspired still lifes of the Northern Renaissance. Lincoln’s Brooklyn Still Life in particular, with its preternaturally spaced items and low-hung mirror, looks like something Jan Van Eyck might have arranged. Yet Van Eyck would have used far less blue and green than Lincoln, who relies on her cool palette to give the work its aloofly introspective aura.

Despite a hand that reaches in to pull back a curtain in Through the Window, a cool image with a large garden window at its center, the only human likenesses in Lincoln’s paintings are in mirrors, picture frames, or drawings left on tables. Lincoln has called these portholes into the subconscious, and the image of an un-smiling but attentive brownhaired girl that appears on or in them her avatar in the two-dimensional world.

Interiority and exteriority diverge and converge in Lincoln’s work, and looking out and looking in are occasionally interchangeable—in Loft Garden, for instance, we’re gazing at a gorgeously arranged assortment of hanging and standing potted plants while Lincoln’s 2-D avatar stares back at us from inside a blue-rimmed frame. We’re gazing in at her as she gazes out.

Through the Window engages states of mind; it’s about the thoughtfulness and self-awareness that creativity requires, but it’s also about the timeworn history of art as a space of contemplation, a space in which time slows to a near stop and the laws of nature are suspended. In space like that, imagination and reality can become difficult to tell apart.

Lincoln holds a B.A. from UC Davis, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from Brandeis University, and an M.F.A. from Temple University. She has exhibited at NurtureArt, Storefront Gallery, Camel Art Space Michael Steinberg Fine Art, and Thierry Goldberg Projects, and recently participated in group exhibitions at West L.A. College and the Nexus Foundation in Philadelphia.

Tyrone Davies- Purgatory of Sweat, Crucible of Bullets

House Gallery is pleased to present San Francisco based conceptual artist and filmmaker, Tyrone Davies. Daviesʼ innovative work manifests through myriad medium; video, installation, sculpture, performance, printmaking and painting, to name a few. he is perhaps most well known for his film and video installation through which he scrutinizes one of the most ubiquitous forms of media, television.

Daviesʼ work is a critical exploration of mass culture and spectacle, as well a direct material appraisal of consumption and obsoleted technologies. Through his thoughtful investigations, Davies draws the viewersʼ attention to the underlining values of a collective culture and obsession with innovation.

Daviesʼ recent work, “purgatory of Sweat, Crucible of Bullets” will be showing at the House Gallery from March 28th through April 2th, with an artistʼs reception on april 1st from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. House Gallery is committed to cutting edge contemporary art in Utah, and is located at 29 e. 400 s. Salt Lake City, Utah.

-Melissa Smolley