Collective Compulsions: the winter group show

Two shows exploring how compulsion can be transformed from a private coping mechanism to deal with a maddeningly repetitive world, into transcendent works of art to be shared.

Artist Reception Saturday, January 17th, 4-7pm; Show Runs January 8th through February 21st, 2009

Johansson Projects presents 2 art exhibitions. Collective Compulsions: the winter group show and a solo exploration by Zach Houston in the back gallery.
When we are faced with intricate detail, we are compelled to look closer, and sink into a meditative pause to contemplate the discipline necessary to create such work. Stepping back from the image, the meticulously built forms disappear into the context of the whole. In Johansson Projects’ survey, the rooms full of laborious process and obsessive mark-making by the 13 artists co-mingle with a year and half of cultivation by the gallery. In addition to traditional materials, used by many of the artists shown here and throughout the year, there is a play of unorthodox materials and methods such as medical tape and elaborate paper cuts. Delicate, dense, panoramic memory maps stretch before us in one piece, only to collapse into spiraling abstractions made from domestic items in the next.

In the back gallery, Zach Houston’s solo show, sad little quiet psychotopography, the obsessive aesthetic as coping method is explored from a different, more intimate, linguistic orientation. Houston offers a selection from his vast archive of stream of consciousness diagrammatic investigations that concern themselves with the ancient past, thickest present and distant future.

Johansson Projects is a contemporary art gallery that functions as a curatorial laboratory, creating exhibitions that pair established and internationally-recognized artists with up-and-coming locals. Johansson Projects was voted best gallery in 2008 and is a locus for curators, collectors and artists to connect and engage in dialogue with the larger art community both regionally and nationally.

Johansson Projects
2300 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, CA 94612
510.444.9140
kimberly@johanssonprojects.com
Kimberly Johansson

This release was published on openPR.