For Immediate Release:
Kadar Brock: wcfsb
Exhibition runs from June 2- July 12
Gallery is open until 9pm on June 17th for Gallery stroll
House Gallery
29 East 400 South
Salt Lake City, UT 84111
www.housegalleryslc.com
House Gallery is pleased to present wcfsb, an exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist Kadar Brock. The artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Salt Lake City, wcfsb opens on June 7th and continues through July 2nd.
The process-based works in wcfsb venture into the world of spell books and fantasy games. The title, an acronym for “Wizard Class Feature -Spell Book,” foreshadows the mysterious but cerebral lyricism that characterizes much of the work in the show. All informed by a grimoire that he has kept in recent months, Brock’s mixed media drawings describe spells chosen by his magic using avatar in the fantasy role playing game Dungeons & Dragons. In the game a wizard memorizes spells during meditation and forgets spells upon casting. Making this literal in the drawings, text is loosely scrawled across each page, and then obscured by black streaks of spray paint and scribbles of ink. As a result, the works are dark attempts at obfuscation rather than recipes for magic. They embody a reciprocal belief in, and doubting of, the metaphysical magic of art making.
In Dungeons and Dragons, the ultimate goal of keeping a spell book is to prepare for campaigning—or going off in search of adventure. Adventurers become their chosen player characters, or avatars, and participate in communal story telling, make real an other reality. Brock sees this dynamic as analogous to looking at and making abstract art - both are processes of participation, and both require a suspension of disbelief for full enjoyment. Beyond this analogy and its implications, the artist is fully invested in creating a contemplative space and the experience of simpatico. The work is self-reflexive and self-destructive in an attempt to represent a loss of self.
An exhibition that’s more interested in the grittiness and detritus of decision- and plan-making than wizardry itself, wcfsb suggests the impetus to strategize and systemize may be more telling, and full of more twists and turns, than the impetus to act.
Brock, who holds a Bachelors of Fine Art from The Cooper Union School of Art, has exhibited internationally. His work recently appeared at Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and Thierry Goldberg Projects.
