February 8 - March 8, 2020
Danny Kerschen is a multidisciplinary artist currently working in the Washington, D.C. area. This exhibition will feature some of his recent paintings incorporating the use of dry pigments and other color sources. And a small collection of his color-dyed, three-billed, reconstructed baseball caps.
Years ago, I awoke to find that at some time in the night Danny (my brother, hence the familiarity, the rest of you can call him Kerschen) had installed a ceiling-to-floor water fountain in the carpeted hallway that connected my room to the single bathroom of our apartment, without warning. At about the same point in his development as an artist, he created and installed a chain of sawhorse-and-safety mesh hammocks, scaled from a matter of inches to over twelve feet tall, with which to stop rush hour freeway traffic.
You see, Danny has a passion for interfering with systems of control. He has some affinity for the wilder side of conceptual art, but– more than that– there is a combination of mischief and aesthetic seriousness that powers his work. A significant share of his practice includes preparing and producing systemic interruptions. Only some of this is rooted in his anarchist ethics; the rest answers to his hidden purposes, whether arisen from mischief or a sense of fun, like the working doorbells he installed on poles near public crosswalks in the Montrose, or the color fields of sorted electrical flags he planted in various abandoned sites in East Houston.
With these paintings, with all their layers of purple and green, you get the feeling that Danny, like Christian Bok and other similarly monomaniacal process poets out there chasing dream whales, has commissioned trans-dimensional chroma elves to write the collected works of Jorge Luis Borges, word for word, in their own strange language of woozy color. And the professionally stitched, impeccably dyed, triple-billed baseball caps he has been making might be part of it too, hand-made for a modern-day Fernando Pessoa and any other wild riders in our midst, who face many directions at one time, external, internal, and the resonant unknown. –Tex Kerschen
Heath Flagtvedt
Born Aberdeen, SD, 1973. Middle school and high school in Arlington, TX. In 1994 Heath dropped out of art school and moved to Houston to play music with Jana Hunter. In 2000, a car wreck, which destroyed all the knuckles of his right hand, ended the band. He currently works in Kennewick, WA. is an artist currently working in Kennewick, WA.
Whether delight or repulsion first comes to you as you approach Heath Flagtvedt’s strange goo says more about your diet and hormones than it does about the things he has a hand in making. Flagtvedt’s plastic-based sculptural works and membranous digital prints alike result from his commitment to a particularly intuitive and gestural kind of process art. He sets up base rules for himself and his generative systems, whether the computational parameters and functions that generate the prints, or the physical application of a heat gun to colorful plastic table covers and straws that brings forth the sculptures. Like a maniacal product-tester, or the Y-hw-h of Job, he subjects his materials to the stresses of heat and pressure and the inclinations of his own hand, working at the threshold at which the plastic begins to degrade and deform. These biomorphic pillars and crispy organs are the fruits of an anaphora of actions—through the body, out of the body, away from the body, back to the body. They’ve been fished out of a Jungian stew of muscle memories, heavy reading, constant curiosity, close observations, and a dancing id. They’re like creatures from our dreams, tagged on the ears and long abandoned, that have returned to us, like therapy dogs, to alleviate our trips to the DMV, the airport, the store, the doctor’s office, and family parties. – Tex Kerschen
Opening: February 8, 2020 | 6–8 pm
Closing: March 8, 2020 | 5–8 pm
4540 W.34th St Suite D
Houston, 77092 Texas
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