Installation view
Katie Herzog
Yankee Candle
January 18 - February 22
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 18th 6-8pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, February 15th, 4pm
Klowden Mann is pleased to present Yankee Candle, the gallery's third solo exhibition with Parkfield, CA-based artist Katie Herzog. The exhibition features works made over the last year and a half in a rural cattle-ranching community in Central California. Herzog uses disparate mediums and formats in the show in order to present a layered narrative responding to issues and materials defining the current political and commercial landscape, including a painting depicting the package design of the new McDonald's "Beyond Beef" burger and a voting booth soft sculpture. Issues surrounding copyright and freedom in the digital realm are presented alongside present-day narratives surrounding public land and rights of access, highlighting the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the subsequent American's with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance the refuge was able to fund with monies allotted to fix what was destroyed during the occupation. In November of 2019, Herzog made a wax rubbing of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge sign, which was the first thing the occupiers rejected and replaced with their own sign reading "Harney County Resource Center". The largest work in the show, "One Dozen Candles", depicts the book covers of a set of twelve books reprinted by the John Birch Society's "Americanist Library" in the early 1960's and sold and gifted to libraries across the country. The society titled the collection of paleoconservative ideology "One Dozen Candles" and included the quote "It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness." The surfaces of Herzog's paintings consist of hundreds of melted thrift store candles bolted to wood panels, topped with oil paint, with each book title dug out exposing the raw wood. Herzog's wildest show to date moves through decades of American matter as a result of digging through archives and Goodwills, working in rural libraries, attending the Libertarian Seasteader experiment "Ephemerisle," becoming a 4H parent, and physically occupying through art, to present her own lit candle as an American artist at the inception of 2020.
The exhibition will be on view from January 18th to February 29th, 2020, with an opening reception for the artist on Saturday January 18th from 6-8pm and an artist talk to be held on Saturday February 15th at 4pm.
Katie Herzog (b. 1979, Palo Alto, California) received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, San Diego in 2005. Recent exhibitions include Mom's Historical Record at Sol Treasures in King County, CA (2019), Terms of Use at UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of Art's in Irvine, CA (2019). Past solo exhibitions include Klowden Mann, Monte Vista Projects, Night Gallery, Autonomie, Actual Size Gallery, and Circus Gallery in Los Angeles, as well as BucketRider Gallery in Chicago, the Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto, CA, the Whittier Public Library in Whittier, CA among others. She was awarded in 2017 a teaching fellowship with ProjectArt, and was the artist in residence at the Cypress Park Branch Library in 2017-2018. She has participated in a number of artist residencies including Skowhegan, The Banff Centre, Bblackboxx, Ox-Bow, Program Initiative for Art and Architecture Collaborations in Berlin, and Soulangh Artist Village in Tainan City, Taiwan. Her work is in the collections of numerous public institutions including The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut, The Rhode Island School of Design, and the Tom of Finland Foundation, among others. Her work has been written about in publications including the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Art and Cake, the Huffington Post, and Artforum. She currently works for the Monterey County Free Libraries and teaches drawing at CalPoly San Luis Obispo.