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