Good Mother Gallery is pleased to present a new solo exhibition, Counterfeit Immortality, by Los Angeles-based artist Carlson Hatton. Opening Saturday, March 1st from 5-7pm at our Los Angeles Location.
In his first show at Good Mother Gallery, Carlson Hatton presents a range of work exploring disjointed figures that fluctuate between gestural abstraction and comic infused figuration. Spanning a period of 5 years, the works fluidly intertwine acrylic paint airbrush, printmaking techniques, and pastels to pull the viewer into a realm of vivid hallucinogenic landscapes. Noses, fingers, rocks, entangled feet, and hooves pull detail to the forefront; these recognizable elements present narratives that ask to be pieced together and deciphered.
The paintings are densely layered and playful, but upon closer examination, narratives of social unrest, inequity, and darker psychological undercurrents emerge. While Carlson Hatton’s color palette is vibrant and celebratory, the themes that surface are bleaker. Take, for example, fragmented figures throwing rocks, under nourished plants wilting, misguided patriots storming the capital, and animals ominously being ushered back into the barn. Motifs of slashes, swipes, and reductive gestures flutter across several canvases, suggesting movement or the sound effects that a child might make to animate their drawings while creating them. There’s both violence and a sense of rhythmic embellishment in the way these forms disrupt a visual while still unifying a composition.
Carlson Hatton often creates an audience of inanimate objects within a painting that are embellished with human-like features (e.g., eyes) to look on at the main scene. These inanimate objects thus form an animated environment that’s witness to our foolish human endeavors and that will ultimately survive beyond our stay. A prominent example of this in Counterfeit Immortality is the recurring theme across several works of rocks clustered together like communities. These rock forms take on familiar human properties, ranging from silhouetted faces to cartoonish features, that suggest a diverse array of identities. In “Good Earth Theory”, a plant-like form inspired by Van Gogh’s “Irises” flourishes within an acid yellow environment. A sea of the aforementioned rocks surround this plant, and indicate an uninhabitable terrain. Smaller plants suffer in the presence of the larger floral monster, but the rocks seem unfazed within their Stonehenge-like formations.
Smaller acrylic and pastel works explore the intimate interior lives of individuals and groups, as depicted in vibrant magenta and toxic green tones. Painted in a loose and impressionist manner, these small format interiors pull a viewer into hot pink interior spaces that emphasize binary oppositions such as participant/onlooker, in group/out group, and longing/belonging. The paintings grapple with memory, real and imagined, and invite us to dive into an interior realm and the psychedelic world outside of oneself.
Opening reception: Saturday, March 1st, 2025 from 5pm-7pm
On view March 1st – March 29th, 2025
Location: 5103 W. Adams Blvd
Gallery Hours: Wednesdays – Saturdays 11am-5pm
For more information or to request a catalog of available works, Please email info@goodmothergallery.com
