ARTIST TALK :: Rachelle Bussières + Blaise Rosenthal + Andy Vogt in Conversation with Zachary Royer Scholz
Friday, February 4th, 4:30PM with Reception following until 8PM
Masks required
Click on @johansson_projects profile on Instagram to view live
Exhibit runs through February 26, 2022
Zachary Royer Scholz will moderate a discussion with the artists in HIGH PLAINS, Rachelle Bussières, Blaise Rosenthal and Andy Vogt on Fri Feb 4 at 4:30PM at the gallery. The talk will be viewable on Instagram Live. Scholz is an artist, designer, critic, theorist, and curator based in San Francisco, California. His critical writing highlights artworks that problematize existing linear schema. His theoretical work posits the need to return to a sustainable structure of generational use, reuse, and continual regeneration. And, his curation forwards diverse creative practices whose aims are sympathetic to his own. Scholz is the founder of the process-based art space Project 7, a regular Art Practical contributor, and co-curated the exhibition Illegitimate Business that launched the alternative exhibition entity known as Will Brown.
Rachelle Bussières’ (b. 1986) practice is based on exploring the impact of light on our psyche, environment and social structures. The products of her process, known as lumen printmaking, include photograms that oscillate between two-dimensional images and three-dimensional objects. These are windows on interior spaces that grow and are depleted by sunlight, as well as artificial light sources such as flashes and light bulbs. She seeks to generate new ways of seeing, to challenge our beliefs and intuitions about perception, and draw attention to the ways in which light and shadow sculpt new optical space.
The first home Blaise Rosenthal (b. 1973) remembers was on the edge of nowhere. At the end of a dirt road in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada he spent his formative years. The elemental character of this environment and its aesthetic vocabulary became archetypal for him. Earth, water, fire, and wind; all in local forms. Seasons. Dusty bare feet and no shirt through dry heat Summers, and the sound of crickets at night. Stars beyond counting. The still death of autumn. Winter, with rain on the roof, the smell of cold smoke, and darkness. And then spring, and resurrection. This place formed his bones and his blood, and much of what is true about him. It made what is his, and what he has to share. It is from the residue of this experience that he forms his paintings.
Andy Vogt’s (b. 1970) work straddles the line between sculpture and drawing, or put another way; between the physical and the imagined. He often uses repetition of physical materials and variation of the material’s color to depict shapes that capitalize on our reflex to see dimension where none, or very little, exists in reality. The works included in “High Plains” are part of a series that utilizes thin strips of wood salvaged from the destruction of lath and plaster walls during the renovation of older buildings. The forms in this series are inspired by the moment of upheaval that architectural demolition brings. When the wrecking ball takes down a vintage building, the materials are thrown into chaos, lightened through the entropic release of force. For Vogt, they change states and become a drawing medium where new forms emerge from the dusty rubble.
High Plains runs through February 26, 2022