Installation view
Srijon Chowdhury, Debra Scacco, Christine Frerichs
Texas Contemporary
September 4 - 7, 2014
Srijon Chowdhury
Christine Frerichs
Debra Scacco
For the 2014 edition of Texas Contemporary, Klowden Mann is very pleased to present work by gallery artists Srijon Chowdhury, Christine Frerichs and Debra Scacco, three Los Angeles-based artists whose practices revolve around ideas of time, place and memory. With distinct formal and conceptual vantage points, each artist approaches the impossibility of fixing either a moment or a narrative in time, rendering the abstracted creation of a story in visual language that ranges from the highly personal to the collective, and often both.
Srijon Chowdhury (b. 1987, Bangladesh) paints in oil on linen, often in large scale, with work that invokes the sensation of myth on a felt level. Intended to act in the space between knowledge and emotion, his work creates access to the present moment as part of a larger, intuited, history. Chowdhury frequently uses repetition to examine the changes and removal that necessarily occur with each re-telling of history: a concept rooted in the experience of overlap and disjunction. With each painting, and each retelling, time becomes collapsed and malleable, and the creation of myth is recognized as existing in the present as much as the past. Chowdhury received his MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2013. He has exhibited in Los Angeles at Klowden Mann, Launch Gallery and Helen Bolsky Gallery, in Miami at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, and at The Gallery in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Christine Frerichs (b. 1979, Los Angeles) is a painter whose work utilizes an individualized language of color, form and material to recall and address past experience, and to offer viewers access to the loss, pleasure, vulnerability and humor available in personal memory. Frerichs integrates traditional and non-traditional materials and techniques—oil paint, acrylic, activated carbon, graphite, wax, Renaissance glazing techniques, Impressionist optical color mixing—alongside her own visual lexicon to create works that are both playful and probing, communicating mood and thought, while expressing the emotional and critical possibilities of abstract painting. Frerichs has exhibited at Klowden Mann, ACME, CB1 Gallery, Kaycee Olsen Gallery, and Young Art in Los Angeles, Duchess Presents in Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, among others. Her work has been reviewed by ArtForum and The Los Angeles Times, and published in New American Paintings, among many others. She received her M.F.A. from U.C. Riverside in 2009, has taught at U.C. Riverside and U.C. Irvine, and is currently Senior Lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design and Adjunct Faculty at East Los Angeles College. Her work is held in private collections both nationally and internationally.
Debra Scacco (b. 1976, Staten Island, NY) describes her work as "addressing the contradiction of collective isolation as a result of contemporary migration." Her practice is based around a conversation between memory, language, impulse, and control, driven by the persistent need to (re)discover permanence in a contemporary life that is by nature always in transition. Scacco's work is both overtly emotional and highly systematic. The act of repetition is vital to her process, as is allowing factors out of her control (i.e. nature, history) to create rules on her behalf. Her approach to making is self-conflicting: oftentimes perpetually repeating phrases from her own personal writings, the contours she meticulously follows are not chosen by impulse, but by the set of rules Scacco has established in order to rationalize her interrupted sense of time and place. Scacco received a BA in Studio Art from Richmond University, London, in 1998, and has exhibited extensively both in America and internationally, including solo exhibitions with Marine Contemporary in Los Angeles, and group exhibitions at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, with Marine Projects at Salon Zurcher in New York, Patrick Heide Contemporary Art in London, and Royal Academy of Arts in London. Scacco's work has been written about and featured in the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, and Art in America, among many others.