Gallery Y & X: Carson Fox, “Sticks and Stones”
Gallery O: Megan Euker, “Bodies, Ghosts, and Shadows”
April 28th, 2018 – June 9th, 2018
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 28th, 2018, 5-8pm
Artist Remarks: Saturday, June 2nd, 2018 from 3-5 pm
Linda Warren Projects is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions by multidisciplinary artists Carson Fox, Sticks and Stones (Gallery X and Y) and Megan Euker, Bodies, Ghosts, and Shadows (Gallery O). When you think of art history’s greatest artists a little obsession is usually not far behind. For these two talented women the creative vocabulary oscillates between order, repetition, and little bit of mania. Within the ritual of creating multiples, their rhythmic process of casting explores personal narratives and dissects notions of time, history, and passion. Each artist will feature a large-scale installation that quantifies a beautiful obsession. Whether it be Fox’s cast resin rocks or Euker’s figure metal casting, each artist delivers a dynamic, and at times, maximalist melody of compositions.
Gallery Y & X- Carson Fox, Stick and Stones
Fox’s interests reside between the natural and the artifice, the tension that exists between the two, and humanity’s interest in controlling time and the great Dame Nature. Part of the exhibition will feature labor intensive sculptures consisting of blades of grass (hand cut & hewn together into patches), rocks (resembling geodes and quartzes of unusual formation), and bundles of sticks made from an array of colored cast resin. Each of them symbolize and point toward the friability of American culture. Clean cut grass and the perfect bundles of sticks find discomfort within their artificiality, suggesting that control is both elusive and a fantasy. The objects are trapped within their materiality, as if longing to find their true yet unobtainable “living” nature. “History preoccupies me in small and grand terms. My interest in time has been a consistent subtext of my practice and the natural forms I select — the formation of rocks and minerals, the rings of trees — all mark time.”
By contrast, the artist will present a wall installation of recent works on paper devoid of color yet equally obsessively engrossed with the notion of time and process.
Carson Fox, “E. Barret Browning,” Maniupulated giclee prints, with an 8” round image on 13” x 13” hahnemuhle paper, 2018
Fifteen 8” round portraits will hang along the gallery walls. The prints originated as steel-cut engravings from the Victorian era, a highly stylized artform with prescribed textures, specific dots, dashes, and cross-hatchings which rendered the images with surprising realism. Fox deconstructs these prints with intricate and complex patterns of small penetrating holes which speak to the notion of lace-making. By deliberately punching out their disappearance, Fox contemplates not only this antiquated process, but the printmakers and the sitters themselves. This artistic process, that was once current and prevalent, is now dead and forgotten in obscurity. Her engagement with these prints reinforces the irony that time is working to erase her too.
Gallery X will showcase Gold Rush, an 8’ x 12’ expanse of over 1,800 gold rocks suspended in midair. The glistening cloud of floating nuggets welcomes the viewers with the pleasure of belief before true circumstances unfurl. The faux rocks modeled after pyrite (fool’s gold) reference the great American gold rush of the mid 1800’s that drew thousands westward and many more to their demise. Viewers can walk under and around the installation as these small objects flicker against the walls. The spectacle of it all is both beautiful and misleading, and an ode to the great American dream.
Carson Fox received her masters of fine arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, her BFA from University of Pennsylvania, and a four- year studio certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Arts and Design, The Royal Museum of Belgium, the Noyes Museum of Art, the Newark Public Library, the Jersey City Museum, the Morris Museum of Art, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, the New Jersey State Museum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado, the Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, NJ, Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, O. K. Harris Gallery, New York, the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, Wales, the Brunswiker Pavilion Kiel, Kiel, Germany, and the Association Mouvment Art Contemporain, Chamalieres, France. In 2009, Fox completed a permanent public art project commissioned by the NYC Metropolitan Transportation Authority at the Seaford LIRR Station in Seaford, NY. Fox has received grants from the University of Rhode Island, the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Mid Atlantic Art Foundation, a Willem Emil Cresson Award, and a New Jersey Print and Paper Fellowship at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Print and Paper. In 2015, Carson Fox finished a major public art installation at the University of Arkansas for their newly complete math and science center, Champions Hall.
Carson Fox is represented by Linda Warren Projects in Chicago, IL and Stanek Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. Fox lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This marks Fox’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Gallery O – Megan Euker, Bodies, Ghosts, and Shadows
With every great love story comes obsession and passion. For Megan Euker it came in the form of a rare blood disease called Beta Thalassemia, an orphan disease. Through a chance encounter in 2016, the artist met Patrizio, a leading advocate in gene therapy research and a father whose son is afflicted by the disease. It was upon this moment, when learning about the disease and experiencing the vulnerability and desperation of this parent, and many others like him, that Euker genuinely falls in love with the cause and its research trajectory.
In response to her experience, the artist decided to make her first cast bronze figure of Patrizio. The figure wears a jacket that was gifted to him by grieving parents who had recently lost their son to Battens, another orphan disease. This single act of compassion and gratitude opened the door for a new body of work that deeply resonated with the artist. Euker’s artistic practice is an ongoing investigation of the human figure and the human condition. Her work reflects highly immersive experiences in which she personally becomes deeply invested and engaged emotionally, intellectually, and at times spiritually to her subject. As a multidisciplinary artist, she moves easily through different mediums and aesthetics yet never loses her sense of empathy for her subjects. This body of work will showcase over 75 cast figure sculptures ranging in sizes and metals by means of the “lost wax process” (or in the case of Euker, a “lost plastic process”). A laborious and seemingly repetitive process is employed in which a mold is made from an original wax or plastic pattern which is then melted and drained out of its ceramic mold.
Megan Euker, “Patrizios (#2 of 4),” Powder-coated Cast Aluminum and Patinated Cast Bronze, Each 6.75”H x 2 7/8”W x 3”D, 2018
Molten metal is poured into the mold which finalizes in a destruction of the ceramic shell in order for the sculpture to come into existence. The form itself is created from a 3D digital file specifically rendered for each and every sculpture – modified each time to accommodate for both changes of scale and the artist’s quest for a more perfect figure. It is this complex fabrication process and the act of replicating, in which destruction and loss happens, that Euker attempts to preserve and perpetuate her figures and narratives. For the artist, the figure possesses a talismanic essence or votive offering. “With my sculptures, I hope to create conduits for new connections and instigate collaboration between art and medicine that will both further research and acknowledge advancements as I create iterations of sculptural forms that memorialize, commemorate, and represent shared passions and partnerships.” Although signatures are embedded in the sculptures, it is still hard to identify the figure. This man is one man and every man. The sculptures move between being bodies, ghosts, and shadows.
Chicago-based multimedia artist Megan Euker has been featured in such exhibition venues as Chautauqua School of Art, New York; Prince Street Gallery, New York; Togonon Gallery, San Francisco; College of DuPage, Illinois; Beverly Arts Center, Chicago; Western Exhibitions, Chicago, and The University Club of Chicago (upcoming); amongst many others. She recently presented the first Orphan Dream Award to Dr. Franco Locatelli at Casa Cava in Matera, Italy and the sculptures have appeared on Italian television including Canale 2 and TRM24. Euker has been the recipient of such honors as a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy; a Faculty Enrichment Grant from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Illinois Art Council Grant; the Artists’ Fellowship, Inc. Grant; Change, Inc. Artist Assistance Grant; and two CAAP (Community Arts Assistance Program) grants from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Council. Euker received her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, Euker is a lecturer in the departments of Contemporary Practices, Arts Administration and Policy, Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects, and Continuing Studies at SAIC. This also marks Euker’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Megan Euker would like to say a special thank you to Patrick Girondi. For more information on the Orphan Disease project and EGT court case, please see New York Supreme Court; index number 150856/2017, Errant Gene Therapeutics against Bluebird Bio and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.