Automatic - Enigmatic

Sophia Allison

York Chang

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 28th, 6 – 10 pm

 

 

 

This two-person exhibition pairs the sculpture/collage of Sophia Allison and the paintings of York Chang. The title references how these artists negotiate the evolving challenge of cultural production and object-making in a world where hyper-capitalist production paradigms flood our sense of “reality” with illusions of authenticity and rationality. Products, logos and their packaging are a ubiquitous feature of our visual landscape, sparking visual pleasure but engineered to induce and facilitate a pervasive sense of need, anxiety and desire. Mass-media images are staged as documentary reality but are un-ironically mediated, unscrupulously edited, and deeply encoded with market objectives.  

 

It is within this context that both artists’ work operates as both automatic and enigmatic.  Utilizing different strategies that rely on contingency and automatism, both Allison and Chang make enigmatic objects and images that frustrate straightforward interpretation. Allison engages in an automatic process, gathering and excavating the detritus of everyday consumer product packaging and transforming them into subversive versions of the organic forms and textures from which they originated. She obsessively and repetitively cuts, rips, tears, shreds and collages bits and pieces of materials, imposing a small amount of control but only enough to make a barely legible map, a kind of visual sense of the elements; otherwise, the materials dictate what they will eventually become. Through her sewn constructions and installations of cardboard, fabric scraps and paper, she creates abstracted works that allude to bits of landscape forms.

 

Chang’s paintings are visual conundrums, juxtaposing images from social realist propaganda, nighttime wildlife snap-shot photography, and luxury advertisements. The push-and-pull of sharply rendered passages and blurred indistinct spaces create a visual flutter that tests the concepts of enigma and the idea of “not-quite-knowing” as a sort of mythology for our post-modern information society.  He often paints over previously unsuccessful paintings, automatically allowing the marks of the past to function as under-paintings for his new work. He instinctively utilizes the ghost images on the canvas to help program his present image-making, an ever-shifting conditional strategy that helps to disrupt straightforward traditional compositional tendencies. 

 

Please join us for the opening reception of this exceptional exhibition on Saturday, June 28th, 2008, 6 – 10 pm

Lawrence Asher Gallery is located at 5820 Wilshire Boulevard , Los Angeles , across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and adjacent to the Craft and Folk Art Museum . Parking is available on Wilshire Blvd. and behind 5858 Wilshire Boulevard . Enter on Stanley Ave. For more information, please call 323.935.9100.

 

The Artists

Sophia Allison earned an MFA in 2001 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BFA from East Carolina University (Greenville, NC) in 1996.  She works in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture and installation.  Her work has been in several exhibitions within the U.S and abroad including Kitsch Catch in both Lille and Sete, France; American Artists and Their Tour of Korea in Seoul at the Insa Art Center and Gallery Ann; the Chautauqua 45th National Exhibition of American Art at the Chautauqua Center for the Visual Arts in Chautauqua, NY, juried by Robert Storr, former Senior Curator at the Museum of Modern Art; the juried annual Southern California Open Show exhibitions (2004-2007) at the Los Angeles Art Association/Gallery 825; and the group exhibition Liminal at Phantom Galleries in Pasadena, CA.  Her work was featured on the cover of the publication New American Paintings, Western Edition #42, juried by Michael Auping, Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, TX.  In 2006, she was one of six artists who created “Sweater,” a collaborative installation directed by artist Tim Hawkinson.  She lives and works in Los Angeles.


York Chang is a painter and conceptual artist based in Silverlake, Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited in art galleries and festivals throughout Los Angeles and abroad, including the 2003 Absolut International Los Angeles Biennale, the 2004-2006 FreshStART, and the Santa Monica Art Studios Grand Opening. LA Times and LA Weekly art critics selected him for the 2004 TarFest juried exhibition.   He also received a juror prize at the Los Angeles Art Association's Southern California Open Show 2004 from James Elaine, the Projects Curator at the Armand Hammer Museum.  In 2006, Chang completed a major two-person exhibition Urban Isolation at the University Art Gallery at Cal State Dominguez Hills with Cal State Long Beach painting professor Yu Ji, followed by a solo show at Lawrence Asher Gallery in 2007. In 2008, Chang participated in Hard Left, the inaugural exhibition of Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Berlin, Germany, and also created a mixed-media installation project Corpus Collossum at Gallery 727 in Los Angeles. His video work was featured in the 2008 Asian New Media show at the Japanese American National Museum Center’s Democracy Forum. Chang also works as a curator, producing the 2007 Dear Jerry Saltz exhibition with artist/co-curator Karyl Newman at the Pharmaka Gallery.

 

  

 

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Lawrence Asher Gallery  |  5820 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 100  |  Los Angeles, CA  90036
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