The Hogar Collection
362 Grand Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211
tel.718.388.5022     info@hogarcollection.com www.hogarcollection.com

Gallery Hours: Thursday - Monday 12:00 - 7:00pm and by appointment

1 Space - 2 Great Shows!!!

Matt Wycoff

Before And After

April 17th – May 18th
Opening Reception: Friday, May 18th, 6-9pm

The Hogar Collection is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition by Matt Wycoff, Before And After. In his first solo exhibition at the gallery, Wycoff will present sculpture, painting and works on paper that work within and reinvigorate formal, minimal, and conceptual art making strategies. This new body of work begins from the assumption that form (the physical things around us) is the foundation from which consciousness builds language and ideas for communication. Historically, this assumption establishes a lineage that begins with form and ends with communication–it creates a movement, or a directional flow, from pure, or pre-linguistic form, to language and ideas that can be communicated. This transformation is a process of approximation, grouping, categorization and generalization. In other words, it is a process of naming. It privileges efficiency and universality over specificity. It does not ask the question, What is this? It asks the question, What is this like?

Writers and critics, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, have argued that this transformation from form to language in the modern consciousness happens almost, if not, instantaneously. Others have gone further and argued that the relationship between form and language can no longer be undone–that we cannot look at a book, and not also simultaneously think, book. The title of a biography about the artist Robert Irwin, “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees,” gets at this idea succinctly. The title implies that, “to see,” is to have an experience of something that is, for a moment, outside of, or before, language. The title recognizes language as an impediment to detail and specificity, which, it assumes, are essential to “seeing.”

One way to think about formal abstraction in contemporary art is as an attempt to slowdown the speed of this movement from form to language. Formal abstraction privileges experience over communication¬–it is an opportunity to revel in the question, What is this? Within a particular frame of reference the answer to this question has become “it is art.” The answer, it is art, negates the original intent to deny classification. In other words, the artwork intended to elude categorization is inevitably categorized into language. This oscillation creates a backdrop for the exhibition, Before And After. The individual works in the exhibition are attempts to get at this pervasive, and rather perverse, feeling of both knowing and not knowing.

Wycoff’s approach is keenly aware of Modernism’s failure to elude reference, but also seduced by the romance of its approach to form. His work operates on a horizontal plane, moving laterally, rather than attempting to push a progressive narrative. In his book, “The End of Art,” Donald Kuspit famously recognized such a strategy as the end of art’s self-realization, and a literal end to art.
Moving past the question of the end of art, what seems clear is that some basic ground rules have been established. The Modernist strategy is incomplete. Works of art cannot, for example, escape the tendency of consciousness towards approximation and the implication of language. Every mark is made by a body, and on a surface, each with their own particular and varied histories, references, and meanings. On the other extreme, to do the opposite and insist that art must serve a more quantifiably functional role (think activist art or relational aesthetics) seems somehow equally negligent.

Our understanding of larger cultural transformation is almost always predicated on a shift from something to something else. The dichotomy between Modernism and Post-Modernism is the most relevant example. What emerges when these frames of reference are shifted or set aside is the possibility for a kind of lateral aesthetic, which moves freely among its referents without getting bogged down in establishing its sequence or framing its opposition.

The individual works in the exhibition, Before And After, harmonize with this strategy, but also allude to broader structures and cultural tendencies. One might think of advertising and the culturally ubiquitous before and after photo, with its promises of transformation, or, of the media’s insistence on framing news in terms of its relation to historical events. The terms pre/post 9/11 or pre/post Katrina are succinct examples of this tendency. Similarly, our most pervasive narratives are also framed in terms of their relation to historicized events. The reference points B.C./A.D, Post-Apocalyptic and After the Fall are all phrases that depend on a concise dichotomy.

Wycoff’s works do not seek to elude this dichotomy, rather, they aim to create experiences whose internal logic illuminate the larger structures by which consciousness transforms experience into meaning.

Matt Wycoff was born in Anderson South Carolina in 1980 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He is a McDowell Residency Fellow, received a Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Residency in both 2007 and 2009, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Travel Grant and a Leon Levy Foundation grant. He has had solo exhibitions at The Leedy-Voulkous Center and Dolphin gallery, both in Kansas City and Rare gallery in New York among others. As well his work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at venues such as the Brooklyn Arts Council, Fellows of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Blue Barn Theater in Omaha, La Esquina in Kansas City, H&R Block Art Space in Kansas City and Farenheit gallery in Kansas City, MO. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri, May 2002.

And:

Ken Butler
Instrumental Bricolage
Sculpture and works on paper

April 17th – May 18th, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, May 18th, 6-9pmFriday,

May 8th, 8 pm
Performance by: Ken Butler's Voices of Anxious Objects
Ken Butler on Hybrid Strings with Matt Kilmer on Hand Drums

The Hogar Collection is pleased to announce a very special exhibition in the “back room” of sculpture and collage based works on paper by Ken Butler. His “Hybrids” are like complex simplicities that are created from society’s discards. Primarily rooted in an amalgamation of sculpture and music, his work expands the possibilities of innovative “low-tech” sonic investigations that synthesize the everyday ordinary trash objects from our utilitarian world into instruments of the unimagined imagination. Playful and wit-fully engineered, Butler’s work in an overall sense reaches for and embraces music’s primal qualities of understanding a universal existence in an ephemeral world.

Ken Butler’s works have been featured in numerous exhibitions and performances throughout the USA, Canada, and Europe including The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Exit Art, Thread Waxing Space, The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as well as in South America, Thailand, and Japan. His works have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, Smithsonian, and Sculpture Magazine and have been featured on PBS, CNN, MTV, and NBC, including a live appearance on The Tonight Show. Awards include fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Ken Butler studied viola as a child and maintained an interest in music while studying visual arts in France, at Colorado College, and Portland State University where he completed his MFA in painting in 1977. He has performed with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Butch Morris, The Soldier String Quartet, The Tonight Show Band, and The Master Gnawa musicians of Morocco. His CD, Voices of Anxious Objects is on Zorn’s Tzadik label.

His work is represented in public and private collections in Portland, Seattle, Vail, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, and New York City including the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

*For more information or images, please contact Todd Rosenbaum (director) at 718.388.5022.

Gallery Hours: Thursday – Monday, 12- 7 pm and by appointment

The gallery is conveniently located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and is easily accessible by all forms of transportation.

Subway: L Train to Bedford Ave, walk south on Bedford Ave to Grand St. Turn left on Grand St, walk 4 blocks, between Havemeyer and Marcy.
L or G Train to Lorimer St, exit on Metropolitan, walk under BQE towards Manhattan, left on Marcy Ave, 2 blocks turn right on Grand at the corner of Marcy. JMZ to Marcy Ave, walk 5 blocks north on Marcy, turn left on Grand St. By car from Manhattan - Drive over the Williamsburg Bridge, 2nd immediate exit at South 5th St, left at light on Havemeyer, right on Grand Street, 4 blocks on right.

Opening Reception Party Sponsored by: