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Laura Lancaster and Vaughn Spann, Friday, April 26, 7–10pm    View this email in your browser

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LAURA LANCASTER

Running Towards Nothing



OPENING RECEPTION

Friday, April 26, 7–10pm


April 26 – May 25, 2019  
 

Night Gallery is pleased to present Running Towards Nothing, an exhibition of new works by Newcastle-based artist Laura Lancaster. This is Lancaster’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. 

Lancaster is known for works which take found photographs as the basis for gestural, highly evocative paintings which reduce personalizing details in service to an exploration of atmosphere. The fluid lines of her paintings push their source material nearly to the point of abstraction, conjuring forms and spatial relationships through oppositions in value. The resulting images take on the murky quality of memory, depicting mundane moments pared down to their poetic essences. 

This new series of paintings marks a material departure for Lancaster, who for the first time uses exclusively water-based paints. From this purely formal decision emerges a new quality to her images: where previous series have taken particular preoccupation with shadows, these works emphasize luminescence. Many of these new scenes involve pools and mirrors, surfaces which destabilize the ground of the image by refracting light. Within Lancaster’s work, they would seem to suggest reality dissolving in real time, warping and doubling our perceptions of space. The canonical nature of Lancaster’s subjects – women seated in front of mirrors, bathers, and dancers in ethereal spaces –  further dislocates them from the specifics of their era to achieve a timeless transcendence.

For this body of work, Lancaster has also expanded her process of translation: whereas previous works were painted directly from photographs, here she has added the intermediary step of pastel drawing, a factor which allows masterfully tight compositions to appear sprawling and freehanded. With her procedure elongated in this way, the works become extended meditations on the search for permanence in experience, testaments to the slippery nature of time.


Laura Lancaster was born in Hartlepool, UK in 1979. She has had recent solo exhibitions at New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK; Sargent's Daughters, New York, NY; Wooson Gallery, Daegu, South Korea; Workplace Gallery, London, UK. Group exhibitions include Dismaland, Weston-super-Mare, UK; Private Utopia, Tokyo Station Gallery, Japan; Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan; Itami City Museum of Art, Japan; Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan; Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; the Museum of Modern Art, St. Etienne; Glasgow International; October Salon, Belgrade, Palazzo Della Arte, Napoli; Accademia d'Ungheria a Roma; BALTIC 39, Newcastle, UK; and the Walker Art Galleries, Liverpool, UK, among others. Her work is included in the British Council Collection; the Ernst & Young Collection; the Government Art Collection, UK; the Hort Collection; the UBS Bank Collection; and the Zabludowicz Collection, among others. She lives and works in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. 

Above: "Nowhere," 2019

VAUGHN SPANN

Dalmatian Paintings



OPENING RECEPTION

Friday, April 26, 7–10pm


April 26 – May 25, 2019


Night Gallery is excited to present Dalmatian Paintings, an exhibition of new work by Vaughn Spann. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

This new body of work continues Spann’s formal investigations of individual subjectivity, drawing symbolism from his own personal history. Here the artist meditates upon his childhood aspiration to own a Dalmatian. Having spent his youth in a New Jersey neighborhood surrounded by Pitbulls, German Shepherds, and other aggressive guard dogs, Spann began to see the Dalmatian (to which he was primarily exposed through cartoons or movies) as a mark of luxury, stability, and an idea of American life that was for him, purely abstract. In the Dalmatian Paintings, he translates this false social reality very directly into formalism. 

Each of the four canvases in this exhibition is composed of grids and patterns. The purebred Dalmatian, an icon ripe with socio-economic signifiers, is reduced to a repeating graphic of black spots on white. These Dalmatian spots are set against blocks of color and densely packed dollops of black paint, some of which protrude over an inch from the surface, giving the paintings a deliberately constructed objectness. This excessively generous use of paint echoes the series’ interrogation of class and access to resources. By utilizing abstraction to examine social issues, Spann has created paintings that are elastically beautiful, personal, and analytical at once.

 
Vaughn Spann lives and works in New Haven, CT. He has recently exhibited at Almine Rech, London UK; Half Gallery, New York NY; David Castillo Gallery, Miami FL; The Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando, FL; and the August Wilson Center, Pittsburgh, PA. His work is included in public collections including The Rubell Family Collection, the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection (The Bunker), the Jimenez-Colon Collection and the Credit Suisse Corporate Collection.  In 2018 he received a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University and he is currently an artist in residence at NEXT HAVEN RESIDENCY in New Haven, CT.


Above: "Dalmatian (No. 8) Blue," 2019

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2276 East 16th Street LA, CA 90021
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