Laurie Hogin: The Course of Empire: New Paintings, Sculpture & Film Costumes
Exhibition Dates: November 4- December 22, 2006
Reception for the Artist: Saturday, November 4, 2006, 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Friday: 10:00am - 5:30pm, Saturday: 11:00am - 5:30pm
Public Contact: 310-836-9055
Koplin Del Rio Gallery is pleased to present The Course of Empire, an exhibition of new works by Laurie Hogin. The show’s title refers to Thomas Cole’s 1836 allegorical paintings depicting five states in the course of empire, from “Savage” through “Pastoral”, “Consummation”, “Destruction” and “Desolation”. It includes paintings, which have been Hogin’s dominant medium for the past fifteen years, as well as new sculptural works and costumes. All these works engage with ideas of multiple layers of allegory, allusion, and metaphor, using materials and traditions with particular referential and metaphorical content to invoke the history of painting and related pictorial practices and their place in both representing and shaping world views. Taken together, along with the allusion to Cole’s allegory, these strategies describe narratives that form a wry commentary on various contemporary cultural and political currents in the U.S.
Best known for her allegorical paintings of mutant plants and animals in languishing, overgrown landscape settings or posed as though for classical still life or portraiture, Hogin’s current interests include the idea that entire narratives are suggested by single images, objects, or collections of objects, in much the way that the history of allegorical and still life painting, advertising images, and fashions imply stories and myths that speak to our desires. The subject matter of these narratives includes the idea that the ecosystems of industry, commerce, desire and identity shape the lay of the land and change the very essence of nature. Angry little songbirds, fashion-model monkeys, cartoon-colored mushrooms, reptiles patterned with the colors of industrial commodities, cosmetics, and modern media sit on rocky outcroppings as though arranged for retail display. Allegorical animal and plant specimens sport the colors of branded commodities and nationalist identity, mimicking pictorial traditions in nature guides, dioramas, store windows, advertising, theatre sets and moments in cinema.
The installation of sculptural objects, including cast-resin fungus specimens and mannequins displaying costumes, invokes retail display, which has its origins in the ideologically charged traditions of the natural history museum and the “wunderkammer” of earlier centuries. The use of fungus is a metaphorical gesture for Hogin: it is both the agent of renewal and evidence of rot in an ecosystem. Glitter refers to the reduction of American ideals to jingoism and market mania—the rot in our most important institutions, yet Hogin suggests hope in natural processes of renewal and in the moments of association and insight brought about by humor.
Allegorical costumes describe characters that might inhabit this proto-apocalyptic world. Hogin conceives of the costumes as being the iconic identities of characters from fictitious films; like the paintings and sculptures, they represent a moment in a narrative from which a story can be inferred. As with contemporary fashion and costume practices, materials, fabrics, and styles stand as historical references to other familiar narratives as well as being metaphors based in poetic or humorous associations, such as gilded chicken bones decorating the ceremonial warrior’s uniform of a post-apocalyptic Emperor, or Hogin’s familiar Mad Bunny becoming the mascot or totem animal for glamorously clad hockey player, a “soldier” in a multi-gendered declaration of identity, or the academic regalia of “Professor Alba Simeon”, decked out more as though for a peep show than for the tasteful whiteness of the ivory tower.
The works in this show revel in the visual, tactile and poetic pleasures of their formal and representational qualities. Hogin’s color palette has acquired the Day-Glo intensity of contemporary media landscapes; she revels in its visual and vulgar seductiveness as much as she casts a critical eye. Her animals remain allegories of culture as much as avatars of her own psyche, whose expressions engage with the emotionality of daily fears, joys, pleasures, desires and outrages and whose furs and skins are both tactile and toxic.
Laurie Hogin received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. This is her 19th solo show and her third with Koplin Del Rio. Her work is exhibited regularly across the country and is in numerous private and public collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, the Illinois State Museum, The United States Federal Reserve, The John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Brauer Museum, Valparaiso, IN, the Racine Art Museum, WI, among many others. She is currently Associate Professor with Tenure and Chair of the Painting and Sculpture Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
