God this sounds good: “Using science fiction more as a point of departure than a rigid formula for making, the work in [IMPOSSIBLE INSTRUMENTS / FUTURE FLAGS, "organized" by Nathaniel T. Price] is uncanny, as it challenges how the strange manifests in the human experience and ways the future is seen.” I don’t even care if it proves to be a slushy armature for a show, I’m all for more sci fi, esp. as divorced from its usually context, AND I’m a devoted futurist (in every sense of the word…from F.T. Marinetti to R. Buckminster Fuller). So I’ll be seeing this show at Fourteen30 Contemporary (1430 SE 3rd) opening tonight, Friday, December 12, with a reception from 6-9 PM, not least because of the lineup of artists including Jo Jackson, Kristan Kennedy, Chris Johanson, M Blash, plus Alex Felton, Corey Lunn, Dana Dart-McLean, Rob Halverson, Steven Wirth, Nathaniel T. Price, Arnold J. Kemp and Bobo.
More from the press release below:
Alex Felton creates sculpture, drawings, and videos that he says resist facile identification with an end or product, underscoring instead the multitude of in-betweens of the studio. With nods to minimalism, architecture, and pop culture, Felton’s sculpture is an exploration of information and how it is processed. Chris Johanson uses mostly scavenged materials to create paintings and sculptures that speak about the beauty and the beastly sides of human existence. Humorous and often harshly frank, Johanson’s work is one part social critique and one part spiritual experimentation. Dana Dart-McLean describes the focus of her painting and drawing as historical textures and atypical history, concerning the personal life in a particular time versus representations of power purporting to be truth.
Artist, writer and curator Arnold J. Kemp’s paintings in this exhibition carry a distinct web-like abstraction, inspired by episode 309 of Star Trek, featuring a menacing galactic web made of shining filaments. Steven Wirth has created photographs that explore the relationships between the cosmos and man, the physical and incorporeal, the representational and the abstract. M Blash describes his obsessive pen and ink drawings as reactions to the perpetual failure of film language, a re-unification of the abstract narratives that dwell within him via the psychedelic landscape.
Bobo originally began as a performance art band, started by Nick Payne, Phil Cote, and Drew Gillespie. The current sculptural work of Bobo is derived from their interest in how the human mind is steadily cracking codes at the base of the natural internet, and the exposure of technology as nature and nature as a fully moldable interface. In her drawings, paintings, sculpture, and animations, Jo Jackson addresses the dualities of the human experience through a visual language culled from both appropriated and personal mythologies. Rob Halverson creates drawings, paintings, prints, and printed matter that are extremely reductive, cursorily detailed, yet expressively vigorous.
Nathaniel T. Price makes paintings and drawings of socially sensitive allegories. Often working from a list of freely associated objects, settings, and actions, Price carefully generates distinct personalities for the characters that work as the main communicative powers in the work. Referring to her own work as both view-scapes of the future and representing a re-ordering of the world by the way of the mark, Kristan Kennedy makes paintings and drawings of bulbous and visceral forms that are both alien and familiar. Corey Lunn’s obsessively articulated drawings and sculptures depict surreal landscapes, hybrid animals and the foibles of the common man. Lunn’s worlds are made up with equal parts dark comedy and social commentary.