Friday, March 11, 2016

Lost in Transit

A few shots of my work up at SOIL Artist Run-Gallery in Seattle, WA, part of the terrific group show Lost in Transit. Thank you Ricky Yanas for these great photographs!


:: Left to Right, Alexis Nutini, Douglas Witmer, Me (Inheritance), Me (Ocean), and Ezra Mauch ::


:: Inheritance, Lead and Fine Woodworking Magazines, 2015 ::


:: Left, Ocean, letterpress on paper, 2015 ::

Lost in Transit explores mythologies of disappearance, the anxiety of travel, and the precarious nature of man-made structures in the work of eighteen Philadelphia artists. Using H. John Thompson’s 2014 sculptural project Holding Our Own (2014), the focus of which is the legend of DB Cooper, the only unsolved airline hijacking in US history, as a jumping-off point, the members of each gallery were prompted to dig into their own bodies of work (new and old) to find formal and contextual similarities that would link them to this loaded subject. In doing so the exhibition acts as a kind of detective tale looking for clues, piecing together bits of information, and attempting to follow elusive threads of continuity and synchronicity within a diverse collection of styles and practices.

The exhibition includes pieces by Marc Blumthal, Marianne Dages, Christina P. Day and Ricky Yanas that engage in the distortion, breakdown, and absence of their subjects. Prints and sculpture by Alexis Granwell, Leslie Friedman,Terri Saulin Frock, and Tamsen Wojtanowski suggest complex and elusive languages that exist outside the realm of logic and rationality. A selection of suitcases made especially for Tiger Strike Asteroid Philadelphia’s space in December’s Artist-Run at The Satellite Show Miami Beach will also be included. These subversive objects hint at the tricky nature of contemporary navigation and travel while also referring to the gallery’s own institutional history.

Together, the works selected for this exhibition form a conceptual trajectory that moves viewers in and out of iconic and banal imagery, ethereal and hardedge forms, light and dark spaces, and into a search for something that may have never been there.

Artists: Todd Baldwin, Marc Blumthal, Mark Brosseau, Lewis Colburn, Christina P. Day, Marianne Dages, William DiBello, Leslie Friedman, Terri Saulin Frock, Alexis Granwell, Ezra Masch, Alexis Nutini, Joanna Platt, Kayla Romberger, H. John Thompson, Douglas Witmer, Tamsen Wojtanowski, Ricky Yanas

A couple more shots of the show in its entirety. The show looks incredible, I wish I could see it in person! Thank you to everyone at SOIL and Marc, Ricky, John, and Mark and everyone else who worked so hard to plan, install, and make it happen.