Window Dressing 2022
Ashton Phillips
FEAST AND FAMINE
Aug 29 – Sep 9, 2022
The humble mealworm (tenebrio molitor) and its cousin the superworm (zophobas atratus)
are the only creatures
known to humanity with the power to transform the ubiquitous petroleum-based plastic
polystyrene (i.e.
styrofoam) into biodegradable components. Synthetic plastic goes in and biodegradable
waste comes out. Part of a
larger body of work exploring the capacity of nonhuman agents to remediate humanity’s
ecological devastation,
Feast and Famine focuses on the transformative and poetic power of this lowly mealworm
as it consumes,
metabolizes, and biodegrades styrofoam waste. Part living art installation, part posthuman
catacomb, and part
durational interspecies performance, Feast and Famine is an effort, as Donna Haraway
has advised, to “stay with
the trouble” and think beyond human-centric norms about what is precious, what is
beautiful, and what is
possible. For its current Window Dressing iteration, Feast and Famine combines chromatic
lighting, window-
amplified sound, and projected video, as well as mounds of partially-consumed polystyrene
foam, interlaced with
flowers, and related objects. The modified magenta lighting environment prioritizes
the needs and preferences of
the insects, which thrive in purple or red light and hide under the glare of full-spectrum
light, but it also recalls the
effects of stained glass in religious architecture, marking the space as more-than-mundane,
while also evoking a
kind of queer futurity, an alterior world where everything is bathed in a synthetic,
hot pink light. The auditory
element transforms the window of the gallery space into an amplification surface for
a complex, interspecies
sound composition, including the sounds of mealworms consuming styrofoam, humans consuming
water out of
styrofoam cups, container ships carrying flat pack boxes and styrofoam through the
Port of Los Angeles, and the
ocean carrying styrofoam debris back to the land. On the wall are projected portrait-like
videos of individual
insects recorded with digital microscopes and endoscopy cameras, a way of honoring
the intimate, embodied
specificity of the insects’ transformative labor, while also positioning the creatures
on equal or higher footing with
the human viewer, in contrast to traditional Western hierarchies that position the
human as the closest to God. On
the gallery floor lie accumulations of partially-consumed styrofoam, gathered flowers,
and related objects,
including silver and plastic vessels of mealworm frass. Simultaneously recalling a
decaying altar, an adorned
gravesite, and Dutch still life painting, the physical installation operates as a
meditation on abundance,
consumption, decay, and the slippery edges between the sacred and the profane.
Ashton S. Phillips is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA, working
directly with the earth, water, pollution, taboo, and repair as primary materials.
He is interested in the wisdom hidden within the material environment, including our
physical bodies, and in the promise of queer ecological praxis, including interspecies
collaboration, embodied “play,” and speculative (un)making, as pathways for making
meaning, building resiliency, and generating new forms of knowing/feeling/being in
the late Capitalocene. Phillips’ work has been exhibited
in museums, galleries, and artist-run spaces around the United States, including the
Torrance Art Museum, SoLA Contemporary, Angles Gate Cultural Center, the Werby Gallery
at Cal State Long Beach, Nikki at Mehle Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana, North Willows
artist-run space in Montclair, NJ, Keep Contemporary, form & concept gallery,
and the Museum of Encaustic Art, in Santa Fe, NM, The New Mexico Cancer Center, Ghostwolf
Gallery, Southwest College of Visual Art, and Santa Maria de Vid Abbey in Albuquerque,
NM, and the University of New Mexico, Gallup, in Gallup, New Mexico. Public art commissions
and participatory performances include Reflections, a 2020-21 participatory sound
art installation in Glendale Central Park; breaking ground, a public performance and
temporary land art installation among the landslide ruins of Sunken City on the coast
of San Pedro, CA; and Helios Rising, a 170 x 7′ mural responding to the path of the
sun in Albuquerque, NM. Phillips studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine
Art, anthropology and queer theory at the University of Maryland, where he served
as the first trans president of the university’s LGBT student caucus, and interdisciplinary
sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art’s MFA in Studio Art program, where
he also taught undergraduate students in the interdisciplinary sculpture, fibers,
and ceramics programs. He also holds a JD from George Washington University School
of Law, where he cultivated a rigorous and expansive approach to material, documentary,
and testimonial research. During his time living on the Navajo Nation in Gallup, NM,
Phillips also worked as an artist-in-residence at Gallup Family and Children’s Counseling,
facilitating mindfulness-oriented art sessions and trauma recovery for Native youths.
He is currently a resident artist at Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, CA.
Raphaële Cohen-Bacry
ROSACES (ROSES)
Sept 12 – Sep 23, 2022
As an installation, Rosaces brings together several large assemblages of cardboard
and metallic paper, each
evoking the round stained-glass windows that famously grace the walls of Gothic Cathedrals
(known as rosaces or
rose windows). Hanging at a distance from the gallery walls, the suspended forms twist
and move independently,
reflecting light off of their colored metallic surfaces, as well as bending that refracted
light into colors projected
onto the walls behind. As visitor’s move around the gallery display, different shades
and brilliances appear and
disappear into their field of vision, highlighting the ephemerality of the experience.
The repeated rosace form
developed by Cohen-Bacry combines their studio-based research around the material
possibilities of working with
recycled cardboard and earlier field work conducted with stained-glass windows while
living in Paris. Taking the
rose window out of its original religious context, the artist proposes to use them
instead as emblems of a modern
yearning for balance and harmony in the face of chaos and uncertainty. In its openness,
both as a porous form and
an infinite shape, the rosace is, and has always been, a metaphor for the circle of
life, with no beginning and no
ending. To emphasize this openness, each rosace references a different, though related,
symbolic pattern, from
the main rose window of Notre Dame de Paris to the Taoist yin/yang to the mathematical
infinity sign to the
Buddhist Dharma wheel to the mystic Flower of Life.
Los Angeles-based painter and mixed-media artist, Raphaële Cohen-Bacry, was born
and raised in Paris, France, where she completed her Doctorate in pharmacology and
a performing arts degree from l’École de la Rue Blanche, with additional training
in painting and printmaking at Les Ateliers Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris and La
Grande Chaumière. Her own artistic practice also carries deep roots in art history,
including a significant influence from prominent European movements like CoBrA and
Tachisme, which excite her due to their lyrical abstraction that leaves plenty of
room for intuition and non-premeditation. Since moving permanently to the United States
in 2003, Cohen-Bacry has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including
at Encino Terrace Gallery, Torrance Art Museum, Alliance Française, the Mike Kelley
Gallery at Beyond Baroque, Coastline College Art Gallery, ArtShare LA, Fathom Gallery,
and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.
Brian C. Moss
OXYMORA
Sept 26 – Oct 7, 2022
We live in a time of 24-hour cable news channels and social media feeds through which
important and mundane
events alike are forever flitting by with the flick of a finger. It can be difficult,
therefore, to critically unpack all the
ways that mediated information is always already coded with the capitalist needs of
the corporate institutions that
present and filter our understanding of the world around us. In truth, this is nothing
new. Traditional print media
has long been unsustainable, with more and more page real-estate dedicated to advertisement
as a means to
compensate for perpetually-shrinking subscriber revenue. Journalistic ethics supposedly
guarantee that
publications like The New York Times will forever be the trusted archive of historical
record, but such grandiose
claims fall apart at nearly any level of careful scrutiny. Brian C. Moss’ Window Dressing
installation, Oxymora,
serves as a conceptual case study, overlaying tag lines from well-known advertising
campaigns onto archival
newspaper pages, demonstrating the dichotomy that exists between the needs of a newspaper
as a business and
the mission of the news industry itself to present the news in a fairly non-biased
form. In the newspaper pages on
display, the advertisements occupy the vast majority of the surface, with a single
news article taking up only a
small portion of the remainder of the design. So many questions arise. What is objectivity
and to what degree is it
even possible? Whom do we trust and why? Tracing the institutional relationships between
advertisement and
news reveals another dilemma, however, they both similarly employ text and images
to make meaning, so how
can they ever be differentiated. While one requires truthfulness and objectivity,
the other is designed to persuade,
and even mislead, on behalf of a capitalist desire to sell a product. (When) does
the ad subvert the goal(s) of the
newspaper? Can the language of advertising be seen with fresh eyes (beyond its context)?
With Buzzfeed lists
masquerading as newsworthy articles and sponsored imagery dominating Instagram posts,
these questions are
more relevant than ever, making an installation assembled from dusty old newspapers
particularly new and
exciting, if only we could slow down long enough to take a good look.
As an artist, Brian C. Moss uses computers, drawings, installation, language, photography
and sculpture. Born and raised in Philadelphia, he attended Tyler School of Art earning
a BFA in painting with minors in photography and art criticism. Later, he moved to
Los Angeles to attend graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts where
he received his MFA in photography. He has taught in universities throughout Los Angeles
since 1997. Moss’ varied and wide-ranging practice includes documentary photography,
multi-media installations, public art and collaborative community-based art projects.
Through these projects, Moss addresses both the personal and the social, poetically
embedding each in the other through their juxtaposition. In so doing, he creates two-
and three-dimensional objects that are simultaneously banal and beautiful. Moss makes
installations that ask viewers to question the ways that perception and visual media
structure and interrelate all facets of experience. His work has been widely exhibited,
including solo shows at the MGSU Peacock Gallery in Cochran, Georgia and Covenant
College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, PØST in Los Angeles, Whittier College, Craig
Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, Cue Art Foundation in New York, Center for Documentary
Studies in Durham, North Carolina, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art in Wilmington
and the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia. To create his own work and for community-based
and public art projects, Moss has received funding from the National Endowment for
the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Durfee Foundation, Los Angeles Department of Cultural
Affairs, Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture, Santa Monica Cultural Affairs Division,
Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, Olson Color Expansions, Kodak and Astra-Zeneca.
Avia Rose Ramm
WASTED REMAINS REMADE
Oct 10 – Oct 21, 2022
Avia Rose Ramm’s childhood took place in an idealized version of the American suburban
home … but now it’s for
sale (the childhood, that is, though maybe the home too, that’s unclear). In any case,
the home where they were
raised to be the ‘perfect’ Stepford-style housewife was, in their words, a waste;
as in “a waste of space, built from
waste, and grown on wasted ideals.” Now that their rose-colored glasses have come
off, they see it instead as a
place of mourning; the nostalgic ick of mothballs and American flags and lost familial
roots. In response, their
Window Dressing installation, Wasted Remains Remade, is a condensed portrayal of self-reinvention;
out of the
ashes, as it were. As a stage for this process, the display window is transformed
into a metaphorical version of
their childhood home with a long domestic hallway covered salon-style with family
portraits - an awkward
arrangement of the nuclear family complete with photos of favorite pets and intermingled
with religious icons –
which gives way, around the corner, to a secluded bathroom, that safest and most private
of havens in the home.
Within these hallowed spaces, a performance ensues. Throughout the first week, all
is ‘properly’ arranged, but
during a live musical and dance performance at the start of the second week, the paintings
and photos on the wall
reveal their changeability. Paintings inspired by the torn-up pages of old magazines
pushing an outdated domestic
lifestyle, the decorative elements initially present one reality, but ultimately shift
through the performance to
present another. The Dancer, an avatar for the artist, interacts with and rearranges
the space through various task-
based improvisations, transforming it into one more comfortable and personally expressive,
a rebellious act of self-
fashioning narrated by the accompanying Musician. Following the performance, the installation
remains as it was
always intended, remade from the waste that was left behind.
Avia Rose Ramm is a San Diego-raised, Los Angeles-based visual artist. Their primary
aim is to portray the vulnerability and the melancholy of living by depicting a fidgety
relationship between themselves and animals. They also take visual elements from Catholic-heavy
art historical periods, such as the Renaissance and the Baroque, as well as their
own personal upbringing, integrating it into their work, often in a crude manner to
address issues of extreme anxiety and depression caused by conservative upbringings.
Ramm uses the depiction of animals, most often sheep, unicorns, and donkeys, in order
to subvert the meanings nominally attached to them and to document their own journey
to self-acceptance. These symbolic creatures that ordinarily carry an extreme metaphorical
weight instead become animals of comfort. They have found much beauty in our individual
experience of the world and seek to portray these abstract, intangible concepts in
a familiar visual way. Their primary mediums are oil painting and multimedia sculpture.
After previously studying painting at the Marchutz Art School in Aix-en-Provence,
France, they received a Bachelor’s Degree in Studio Arts from San Diego State University.
Recent residencies include Art Produce and Bread and Salt, with selected exhibitions
at Trash Lamb Gallery, Swish Projects, Weird Hues Gallery, and the Everett Gee Jackson
Gallery.
elin o’Hara slavick
CATHARSES / ANTIDOTES
Oct 24 – Nov 4, 2022
The series of diptychs that make up elin o’Hara slavick’s Window Dressing installation,
Catharses/Antidotes, began
as a therapeutic attempt to purge her mind of recurring negative thoughts. When she
first read the student
evaluations from the very last course of her nearly three decade-long career as an
art professor, slavick nearly
vomited. These comments haunted her, keeping her up at night (surprise, surprise,
teachers are human too). After
asking friends how to keep these kinds of thoughts from overtaking her sense of self-worth,
she received
conflicting suggestions. Some told her to train her brain to banish bad thoughts,
while others suggested therapy,
exercise, something called EDMR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), or
even just a stiff drink. But
after listening to Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast, she concluded that the best
response would be “to sit with the
feelings; to write it all down; to focus on and process the negative to get to the
other side, to get through it.” Thus
began an extended project to sit and paint the very words that had disturbed her.
A state of liberation set in.
Suddenly, insults became compliments, jokes, and reflections on – and revelations
of – the speakers. Posting these
text paintings on social media - sharing her dirty laundry, so to speak - helped her
to let go, and suddenly others
were doing the same. Of the 100 Catharses paintings in her series, the first 28 come
from statements made to her,
but the rest come from reported commentary addressed to others. For each, she composed
an accompanying Antidote, a cure made from the very poison it defends against. She
realized that words such as these have been said to many other people and, in fact,
worse things have been uttered, screamed, and whispered before. She is not unique,
which makes the hurt less painful to endure and the feeling all the more relatable
to others. While aesthetically these drawings may be considered ‘bad art’ in a traditional
academic sense, lots of the best art, the pieces that stay with us, are made from
the difficulties of our world, the struggle, the icky parts. In citing numerous text-based
artists as influential precedents for this project - from Ed Ruscha and Deb Kass to
John Baldessari and Jenny Holzer - the artist particularly highlights Tracey Emin,
for her darkly humorous and sincerely personal confessions, and Barbara Kruger, for
her ambiguous use of genderless pronouns, such as YOU and I, that
inevitably implicate and/or address the viewer. Anyone could be on the receiving end
and/or originating
expression of these statements and, in particular, they could be about anyone existing
in an unequal power
dynamic: president/citizen, boss/employee, teacher/student, husband/wife, parent/child,
enemy/friend. However,
while amplifying the words, the Catharses paintings also subvert their very meaning.
And the Antidotes, by
answering (or arguing against) each negative comment, offer a solution, a gesture
towards peaceful resolution, a
balm for deep wounds. If, as Sarah Schuman says, “conflict is not abuse,” these diptychs
seek to reveal the conflict
in order to avoid the abuse, and engage in the deep psychological work required for
healthy discourse.
elin o’Hara slavick is an Artist-in-Residence at the University of California, Irvine.
She was a Professor of Studio Art, Theory and Practice at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill from 1994 until 2021. Her interdisciplinary work critically
explores war, memory, exposure, memorials, cartography, history, labor, feminism,
the body, politics and utopia/dystopia. Slavick has exhibited her work internationally,
and her work is held in many collections, including the Queens Museum, The National
Library of France, The Library of Congress, The Nasher Museum of Art and the Art Institute
of Chicago. She was previously represented by Cohen Gallery in LA. Slavick is the
author of two monographs - Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography with a foreword
by Howard Zinn, and After Hiroshima, with an essay by James Elkins; a chapbook of
surrealist poetry, Cameramouth; and Holding History in Our Hand for the 75 th commemoration
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She has held artist residencies in Canada, France, the
Unites States and Japan, most recently as a Huntington Art Fellow at Caltech. Her
work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Images Magazine,
FOAM, San Francisco Chronicle, Asia-Pacific Journal, Photo-Eye, and Actuphoto: Actualite
Photographique, among other publications. She lives in Irvine, California with her
epidemiologist husband Dr. David Richardson, two children, a dog and a cat.
Flora Kao
WITNESS
Nov 7 – Nov 18, 2022
Flora Kao’s Window Dressing installation, Witness, is an investigation of memory and
longing thru physical
rubbings of site. Exploring touch and bodily knowledge, Witness records the natural
topography of places where
the artist sought solace during times of intense emotional turmoil and grief. In the
expansive rhythm of garden
stones and the tenacious beauty of mussel-covered boulders, she found safe harbor.
Large gestural rubbings of the
sites anchor these moments of psychological intensity, bearing witness to perseverance
and rebirth in the face of
catastrophic loss and change. Like the rocks they record, these meditative drawings
capture the memory of a
place. A large-scale 6’x18’ colored rubbing from Descanso Gardens stretches across
the gallery display’s long wall,
while a smaller 6’x6’ rubbing of mussel-covered boulders in Malibu cover the short
wall. Assorted rocks
accumulated over a lifetime are arranged on the floor in front of the wall drawings
on a third rubbing taken from
Las Piedras Beach. By working across these multiple ecosystems, Witness compresses
the artist’s experience of
space and time into an evocative installation reflecting on the very meaning of place.
What is knowledge? How
does the body come to know a place? What does it mean to feel and press against every
bump on a boulder and to
take its imprint away with you? To touch each crevice, to translate texture through
one’s body, to make an imprint
of a surface as it registers at a moment in time. What happens when you combine the
residue of remembrance
from disparate sites?
Working in installation and painting, artist Flora Kao explores the poetics of human
relations with the environment, examining various forms of architecture and technology
by transforming everyday structures into systems of beauty. Kao holds a MFA from UC
Irvine in Studio Art, a BFA in Painting from Otis College of Art and Design, and a
BA in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College. In Los Angeles,
Kao has exhibited solo at Pasadena Museum of California Art, Commonwealth and Council,
Gallery 825, Art-merge LAB, HAUS Gallery, the LA Art Show, and the UC Irvine University
Art Gallery. Kao’s work has also been featured at Intersection for the Arts in San
Francisco, Emily Harvey Foundation in New York, Infernoesque in Berlin, and at various
Southern California venues including Torrance Art Museum, Irvine Fine Arts Center,
City of Brea Gallery, National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, Culver Center
for the Arts, LAXART, See Line Gallery, Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Beacon
Arts Building, Phantom Galleries, West LA College, California State University Long
Beach, and La Sierra University.
Gloria Gem Sanchez
RECIPROCITY
Nov 21 – Dec 2, 2022
Gloria Gem Sanchez’s Window Dressing installation, Reciprocity, is inspired by Pan-Indigenous
ways of life, as well
as the ecological theories presented in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s influential book, Braiding
Sweetgrass. An
interdisciplinary and multimedia installation, Reciprocity incorporates site-specific
natural elements and images
that convey the beauty and gratitude of the earth and all the living beings around
us, including the animals, the
plants, and the elemental powers of fire, air, water, and earth. The items and images,
printed using the early
photographic cyanotype process, are arranged into a circle, a common and sacred shape
that is frequently
integrated into Pan-Indigenous ceremony, spirituality, and worldview - alluding to
our interconnectedness and the
ongoing cycles found in all life. In the center of the cyanotype circle is a simple
braid of sweetgrass, while
underneath lay candles, a bowl of water, and flowers to represent fire, water, and
earth. Feathers are mounted
near the upper sides of the cyanotype circle to represent air. This is, in effect,
a small altar. On either side of the
circle are two photographs of the artist - from a series inspired by Mindanao/Filipinx
folklore known as the
Sarimanok. This bird-goddess is a “twin-spirit,” composed of two identities: Inikadowa
and Itotoro, the seen and
unseen, one of the earthly plane and the other from the sky realm. These images are
present in order to represent
our physical connections to both the earth and the sky, as well as the importance
of our spiritual connection to our
Ancestors, particularly their traditional ways of mindfulness and earth stewardship.
Sheer fabric runs down the
wall to the floor, meeting with more fabric that forms a metaphorical river made from
hand dyed cotton with
mixed fibers resonating with the hues and values of watery blue. Around the corner,
a second altar sits, echoing
the first. At the center, a photograph shows the back of the artist’s head, her hair
in a braid, representing unity
with all things, heeding the popular Indigenous knowing/saying, “All My Relation /
We Are All Related.” Hair, in
particular, is significant here, alluding to memory and growth; encouraging all to
develop positive relations with all
our living relatives, and not just the human ones. Positioned in front of this image
sits a golden assemblage made
from four walis tambo (the Filipinx name for a grass broom) of palm and guava leaves.
Titled Linisin: Limpia (which
translates to “Cleanse: Cleanse”), this sculpture again highlights our personal responsibility
to heal, to begin our
own limpias, our own cleansing, in order to be better relatives on, and to, this earth.
While inspired in large part by
the artist’s own Xicanx-Filipinx background, the period of the exhibition’s display
also intersects with a popular
American celebration mythologized around the concepts of gratitude and reciprocity,
though one forever
problematized by the horrific histories of genocide and environmental exploitation
that both predate, and follow
from, its origin story. With that in mind, it becomes all the more relevant and urgent
to heed the installation’s
powerful message of healing and thanksgiving.
Working and residing in the Harbor Area / South Bay of Tovaangar (Los Angeles), Gloria
“Gem” Sanchez earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting with a minor
in Art Education from Cal State Puvungna (Long Beach) in 2014. She is a Xicana-Filipina
American interdisciplinary artist, arts facilitator, and emerging curator that works
in fibers, installation, drawing, and painting. Her recent work combines sculpture
and weaving to create a fusion of natural and contemporary materials inspired by memories,
stories, dreams, and motifs gathered from her hybrid cultural identities, spiritual
cosmologies, and decolonial way of life. Gloria has worked within the local and broader
Tovaangar (Los Angeles) community over the years to generate grassroots art actions,
as well as participate in events that focus womxn’s rights and abolition. Gloria is
an active member of FA4 Collective, which runs as an informal CSULB alumni association
and works together to facilitate art shows, residencies, community engagement, as
well as to maintain a supportive space to help each other develop as artistic professionals
and cultural producers. She is an alumni and affiliate of Slanguage Studio founded
by Mario Ybarra Jr. and Karla Diaz, Wilmington’s first artist run space. She is a
Board Member of Angels Gate Cultural Center and is on the Core Committee of the Many
Winters Gathering of Elders that takes place on Xaraashnga (Angels Gate Cultural Center),
a Native-led grassroots cohort that brings together Native American Elders from across
Turtle Island to share Medicine and Ancestral Knowledge with an emphasis on ceremony
and collective healing. Gloria has exhibited work at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery,
Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Tin Flats, Luna Anais Gallery, Angels Gate
Cultural Center, FAR Bazaar at Cerritos College, Downtown Art Center Gallery, Pasadena
City College, LA><ART, Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles Water School,
Consulado Mexicano de Los Ángeles, Mini Art Museum, MOCA Geffen Plaza, El Comalito
Collective, Pintados Philippine Art Gallery, Flux Art Space, LeiMin Space, Angel City
Brewery,Machine Studio, and ArtShare LA.
Philip Košćak
IM LATE TO THE PARTY BUT IM ALWAYS ON TIME
Dec 5 – Dec 16, 2022
Philip Košćak uses their memory of Kermit the Frog to explore various aspects of their
own identity, including race,
gender, and sexuality. By multiplying these figures through many different iterations,
they represent concurrent
related personas: sometimes, as self-reflection; sometimes, as friend, and, sometimes,
as lover. For their Window
Dressing installation, im late to the party but im always on time, these iterative
figures fill the entire space of the
gallery display. Playful gestures abound, as each painted, freestanding, human-sized
frog-person expresses itself
through unique poses and postures. Some figures are flying, some embrace, some are
sexy (but not too sexy).
While the installation loosely resembles a storefront display, these figures are not
here to sell anything in
particular; the drawings are props and the figures are here to perform.
Philip Košćak’s research and work investigates race, gender, sexuality, and memory.
They hold a BA in Art and an MA in Visual Art from California State University, Northridge.
In 2017, they received their MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art and the
following year was a visiting fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. Košćak’s work has
been exhibited at Mata Gallery (in partnership with Avenue 50), Angel’s Gate Cultural
Center, the Torrance Art Museum, PAM Residencies, George Caleb Bingham Gallery, ESXLA,
GLAMFA, Forum Gallery, and the Cranbrook Art Museum.
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