Child's Play

Child’s Play relives the childhood experience of unfiltered expression through artistic techniques, styles, and content. Using what initially appears to be “bad” painting, the featured artists capitalize on the accessibility and familiarity of elementary art making to address larger personal and social topics. The artists engage in energetic mark making or incorporate juvenile materials to...

Child's Play: James Rielly

Painter James Rielly bewilders viewers by disorienting and distorting expectations of childhood innocence. Painting with a certain level of childish, or untrained technique, Rielly’s paintings exhibit ironies of sexualized desires and “eroticized anxieties.”[1] Hardly overt in representation, Rielly’s paintings reverse roles of adults and children to hint at social disorder and collective...

Child's Play: Philip Guston

Philip Guston’s extensive career, spanning from the 1930s to 1980, evolved through a number of stylistic transformations. Guston began working as a figurative painter in the 1930s, but his artistic inspiration subsequently stimulated a reconsideration of his work, turning towards abstraction in the late 1940s as part of the abstract expressionist movement. And in the 1960s, marking the final phase...

Child's Play: Nicola Tyson

Nicola Tyson paints amalgams of distorted body parts and colored shapes, creating mutilated zoological beings. Tyson’s paintings are engrossing, painted imagined beings with vivacious color float in undefined spaces of mono- or dichromatic backgrounds. As described in an exhibition catalogue for her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich, “anatomical normality becomes a rarity, childish timidity evokes...

Child's Play: Daniel Coombs

Born in the 1970s Daniel Coombs, known to some as Dan, has masterfully invented a new language within the conversation of bricolage. Much of Coombs’ previous work was primarily sculptural, unifying kitschy gadgets and amputated toy limbs then splattering this newly fabricated construct with paint to animate its presence--the comparison to Rauschenberg or Oldenburg is almost unavoidable. Similar...

Child's Play: David Deutsch

Los Angeles native David Deutsch has a history in landscape painting, however his recent shift towards more abstracted scenes of driving cars and family houses offers a greater impression of movement, beyond our perceived reality. His painting style has become loose and gestural, offering an energy “like a Dionysian outburst, an orgy of painterly pleasure"[1] that appears to come from an intuitively...

Child's Play: Gary Hume

Gary Hume, a member of the YBA (Young British Artists), gained artistic recognition in the early 1990s, having graduated from Goldsmith College and showed in Damien Hirst’s exhibition Freeze, both in 1988. As a member of the YBA, Hume exhibited art that presented a shock value. He simplified color and form significantly, reducing his subjects to a few potent hues. This drastic simplification renders...

Child's Play: John Ashbery

Born in Rochester, NY in 1927, John Ashbery is best known as a poet, secondarily as an artist who began creating collages as more of an enjoyable hobby than profession. It was not until age 81 that Ashbery held his first solo exhibition. Yet both creative outlets dually influenced each other. Ashbery’s poetry, as described in Modern Painters “is renowned for its chatty obliqueness, and for its surreal,...

(Un)Masked

(Un)Masked explores new ways to imagine identity; rather than through literal representations of the self, this exhibition examines the hidden self, the masked self. (Un)Masked addresses issues of race, gender, and nationality to communicate larger issues within our current socio-political climate. Featuring contemporary work, this exhibition combines video art, collage, painting, and...

(Un)Masked: Zeng Fanzhi

Between 1994 and 2001, Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi painted his socially pertinent 'Mask' series, visualizing the ways in which humans interact and form relationships within the public sphere, and the imaginary masks people wear to conceal their private identity to conform to societal standards. Initially a means to express Fanzhi's personal emotional distress, the artist's 'Mask' series evolved into...

(Un)Masked: Jean-Michel Basquiat

For most of his life Jean-Michel Basquiat fought against social expectations and pressures imposed upon him as a result of his cultural identity. Born to mixed race parents, his father Haitian and mother first-generation Puerto Rican, Basquiat’s racial identity was often misunderstood. Despite an upbringing offering middle-class benefits, Basquiat assumed a more underprivileged appearance, wearing...

(Un)Masked: Adriene Hughes

Emerging photographer Adriene Hughes explores the process of self-definition and the relationship between humans and our most primitive instincts in her series deer/woman. In this series, Hughes turns inward, to her personal battle with cancer and the effects it has had on her identity. In deer/woman Hughes photographs herself; fully dressed in women’s clothing, she wears a deer mask and poses in...

(Un)Masked: Hans Haacke

Han's Haacke's 2004 photograph Star Gazing emerged during a period of political conflict and social unrest. Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the war America waged in the Middle East prompted unjust violence against innocent victims in order to reaffirm authority. With heightened censorship imposed upon war-related broadcasting, images from America's war on terror became more powerful, revealing,...

(Un)Masked: Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe’s film The Host and The Cloud reflects his personal interest in examining human existence under slightly altered conditions, looking at the roles they assume and behaviors in which they engage. To effectively survey the range of human experience in an aesthetic environment charged with art-historical meaning, Huyghe shoots his film at the Musee National des Arts et Traditions Populaires...

(Un)Masked: Brian Bress

Artist Brian Bress, born in 1975 in Norfolk, Virginia, combines his passion for two-dimensional painting, interest in three-dimensional sculpture, and fascination with film art to create collage-like videos that appear fantastical, experimental, psychedelic, and performative, all at the same time. Bress’ playful videos have a synesthetic quality that push the boundaries of art to the point of entertainment,...