curated by Harriet Salmon, Jason Tomme & Ana Wolovick
Press Release:
The show combines recent work completed and exhibited while in residence at the 2015 SOMA summer program in Mexico City, alongside other works made within the past year.
Wolovick layers elements of photography, abstract painting and geometric structure to create a complex, brightly colored visual language. Whether it be synthesizing aspects of Puerto Rico or New Zealand, the tactile imagery and surprising arrangements embodies turbulence in the landscape alongside a sense of beauty found, and disrupted.
The largest installation in the exhibition is a grouping of over 40 collaged works on paper and board produced in Mexico City. Found patterns from lacework to party decorations to architectural motifs and ancient symbology, are combined with photographs taken on-site, documenting the city’s many triumphalist public monuments. Because of the history of this iconography and the instinctual and touristic way it was gathered, the work is in dialogue with notions of how power weaves through culture in both large and small ways. Visually the works reflect the city’s character as revealed through its complex strata.
Also on view are a smaller series of collages and a series of small paintings on panel that pull from the artist’s previous studies of Puerto Rico, New Zealand and Germany, over the past several years. The entirety of these works, while reflecting a site-specificity to given places, continue Wolovick's research into the global visual ubiquity of the monument, where its field of power intersects with the personal and poetic.
