Soloway is pleased to present:Feelers,
Branden Koch, Dani Restackl and Kevin HooymanJune 12 - July 17, 2011
Opening Reception: Sunday, June 12, 6-8 pm
Gallery hours: Saturday and Sunday 12-5 pmWhen Picasso was asked. "Why don't you ever paint landscapes?" his answer was "because I've never seen one". The works in Feelers give form to the unconscious inner landscape using the material of the physical world: weather patterns, humans and animals, water and neon. The recognizable elements in these works don't follow laws of physics or rational thought. Eyeballs roll on the ground, a person walks underwater, and inanimate objects give advice. These behaviors are all familiar, not because they have been seen, but because they have been felt.
Branden Koch's ‘weather paintings’ use the graphic symbols of hot and cold fronts that we see colliding every night on the evening news to represent the invisible but perceptible. These forces meet and physical chaos ensues; the compass won’t stop spinning, boundaries between figure and ground collapse, and patterns become absurd and untrustworthy.
Dani ReStack's work invokes acts of communication so private that they border on the guileless, almost like prayer. The earnestness of this communicative urge is no better summed up than by the title of her sculpture, Here I am Ready and Willing. The exhibition also features a selection of her diaristic drawings.
Kevin Hooyman's drawings are a compelling mix of the alien and the intimate. In his work, everyday social interactions and private thoughts are laid out with a bare simplicity that is both revealing and disorienting. His means are economical and his material is familiar; the shock of his work is in the immediacy and clarity of his idiosyncratic hand.
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Branden Koch was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned a BFA in painting from The Cleveland Institute of Art in 2001, and an MFA in painting from Bard College in 2005. He has exhibited his work at High Energy Constructs, LA, CA; Romer Young Gallery, SF, CA; The Harwood Art Center, Albuquerque, NM; as well as in various group shows in NYC. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Dani ReStack received an MFA in film/video from Bard College in 2009. She has screened her work at Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Gene Siskel Film Center, CineCycle and Anthology Film Archives. In 2011 she got a Captial R award from the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her work is in the collection at MoMA and Yale University. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Kevin Hooyman is a an artist working in Providence and upstate New York. He has exhibited his work widely both stateside and internationally and is included in the collections of MOMA and The Art Institute of Chicago. He has also published numerous books, most recently Time Limit Fantasy with Nieves in 2010.
