Figure. Heads. features heads, figures, and forms made from varied materials, including ceramics, paint, paper mache, textiles, and wood, by local, West Coast, and national artists. The works are playful and quirky, nonconformist renderings of the human visage and form. Fun and off-kilter, the exhibition is intended to delight and disconcert.
Exhibiting Artists include Blake Blanco, Johanna Goodman, Robert Hardgrave, Jon Huck, Ryan Kelly, Kim Tucker, and Brandon Vosika. The show opens September 14 with an artist reception 5p – 7p and runs through November 3, 2024.
About the artists:
Through gesture and his vivid color palette, Blake Blanco’s imagined portraits explore the complex nature of identity. The work celebrates the beauty that can be wrought from the chaos and challenge of traversing the path of self- exploration.
In her ongoing series The Catalogue of Imaginary Beings, award-winning New York-based Johanna Goodman explores historical and cultural artifacts as talismans, idols, and totems. Originally created as digital collages featuring fashionably attired beings mixed and matched with natural, structural and surreal backgrounds, Johanna’s beings enter the three-dimensional world through her quilts and soft sculptures.
Robert Hardgrave has a new series of heads and figures created from quotidian objects, such as packing materials and repurposed bits and bobs brought together with paper mache and finished with his signature transfers. Foreign and familiar, fun and sometimes far out, the new works are composites of Robert’s unmistakable styles.
Through various media such as watercolor, ink, paper, and wood, Jon Huck invents offbeat and amusing characters with strange and unexpectedly alluring qualities. Both human and animal-ish, Jon’s creations have a reliable charm.
Ryan Kelly’s ceramics are inspired by his study of and appreciation for historic and contemporary kitsch ceramic objects and their ability to carry the stories of not only the objects, but those that created and owned them. With a playful yet reverent regard, Ryan refashions the more historical, formal qualities into pieces that serve a contemporary world in which identifiers are more in flux.
Los Angeles-based ceramicist Kim Tucker constructs “figures that are outsiders caught in moments of vulnerability.” Her creations are both endearing and slightly unsettling by revealing their innermost vulnerabilities on the outside. Her characters have a quirky humor that gingerly holds the condition of being a “wonderfully imperfect human.”
Brandon Vosika’s colorful and playful portraits of real or imagined people play with surreal sensibilities and a fauvist love for color. His subjects connect with the viewer on a tender level even if they may be holding tucked-away secrets.
Save the dates:
Saturday 10/5 at 3p – An Afternoon of Artist Talks with Blake Blanco and Robert Hardgrave
Saturday 10/12 at 3p – Another Afternoon of Artist Talks with Ryan Kelly and Brandon Vosika
