Installation view
Katie Herzog with Andrew Choate
Exegesis Eisegesis Encaustic
June 18 - July 16, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 18th, 6-8pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, July 2nd, 4pm
Closing Reception Celebration Concert: Saturday, July 16th, 7-9pm
KLOWDEN MANN is proud to present Exegesis Eisegesis Encaustic, a collaborative exhibition of work by gallery artist Katie Herzog, and Los Angeles writer Andrew Choate. For Herzog’s first solo show at the gallery, she invited Choate to collaborate on a series of encaustic diptychs that depict and refract signage text in and around Los Angeles. The exhibition will be on view from June 18th through July 16th, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 18th from 6-8pm, and additional supplemental dialogue, and music programming to take place in July. A book on the exhibition will be published by Insert Blanc Press in Winter 2016.
Exegesis Eisegesis Encaustic embodies a playful engagement with material and structural aspects of language, serving as a meeting point of production for two unique visual and textual artistic practices. Herzog and Choate choose signs they find across Los Angeles that are not iconic but are representative: both generic and evocative. Once the signs are chosen, Herzog and Choate then mirror and refract them in order to create partner signs with new language. Choate rewrites the existing signs using a variety of methods of refraction for each one depending on the physical and syntactical qualities of the words in combination.. Herzog then forms the compositions and creates the paintings using encaustic. “L Lu Sub: Coffee, Sandwich, Drinking Water” turns into "Elusive G: Ultimate Coffer, Go To The Well”, “Ethical Drugs” into “Mistaken Hugs” and “Family Dentistry” into “Thoroughbred Narcisstry”.
Encaustic painting, one of the world’s oldest art forms, is the technique of applying molten pigmented beeswax to a surface and fusing each layer. In Ancient Greece, encaustic painting was applied to architecture, warships, and sculptures around the Acropolis, and in Ancient Egypt was used to paint portraits on mummified bodies, while in the 20th century, artists such as Jasper Johns, Lynda Benglis, and Brice Marden brought the form back into popular Western awareness. Choate and Herzog connect the internal experience of a time/place/city with the external representations and perception of that place, prompted by the charged relationship between sign and signified that occurs in every act of naming.
Individually, Choate and Herzog have both long been focused on issues surrounding language and materiality. Herzog has often organized her practice around projects using specific vantage points to look at the interplay between embodiment, language, and the power at play in different knowledge economies. Choate’s work is formed through language that acts as material and object. In speaking of Exegesis Eisegesis Encaustic, Choate says, "The idea that words are outside of things is not only an error of perception, but also an error with political valence and ethical repercussions that misshape how the world is experienced. This collaboration requires that words be put inside of things, to see what new arrangements do to us."
Katie Herzog lives and works in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Director of the Molesworth Institute, and is a Board Director for Monterey County Free Libraries. Herzog received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001, and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2005, with additional study at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Columbia University. Herzog has participated in residencies at Bblackboxx in Basel, Switzerland, the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, Program Initiative for Art and Architecture Collaborations in Berlin, Germany, and Ox-Bow in Saugatuck, Michigan. She has received an ARC Grant, and the Florence Leif Award For Excellence In Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her exhibitions in Los Angeles have been held at Monte Vista Projects, Night Gallery, Autonomie, Actual Size Gallery, and Circus Gallery among others, as well as at numerous public and commercial venues across California. She has also shown work at venues in England, Philadelphia, Illinois, Canada and Mexico, including a solo presentation at NADA NY with Klowden Mann in 2015. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Tom of Finland Foundation, and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut, as well as numerous private collections, and has been written about extensively in publications such as Artforum, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, and New American Paintings. A comprehensive discussion of her series Transtextuality (Senate Bill 48) was included in the recent TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly from Duke University Press. In the Fall of 2016, Herzog will be a Lecturer at the University of California, San Diego.
Andrew Choate is an artist/writer who was born and raised in South Carolina. He studied music and literature at Northwestern University and the California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of several small press books of poetry, photography, and art criticism and has two books forthcoming in 2016: I Love You More (Insert Blanc), a collection of his texts for performance, and Learning (Writ Large), a self-help/mystery collage. His radio plays and sound works have been broadcast on WDR in Germany, Radio Arte Mobile in Italy, Hipersônica in Brazil, Resonance FM in England, and various outlets in the US. As The Unwrinkled Ear, he produces a monthly concert series dedicated to bringing international improvised music to Los Angeles, and hosts a radio show on KCHUNG every other Tuesday from 5-7pm PST. His Instagram page @saintbollard is an index devoted to photographs of bollards and has over forty-seven thousand followers. He has been invited to present his bollard writing and photography around the world: at the Material Art Fair in Mexico City for Bikini Wax gallery; performing at the Kulcsar Haus in Vienna; organizing a bollard tour for Atlas Obscura in Los Angeles; headlining the Dunedin Fringe Festival in New Zealand - where he won the award for Best Visual/Performance Art as well as the Warwick Broadhead Memorial Award. Articles and interviews with him about his bollard project have been featured by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, the Otago Daily Times (New Zealand), and Atlas Obscura.