C24 Gallery is pleased to announce Other Voices, an exhibition of works by Katja Loher and Rohan Wealleans. The exhibition will be on view July 9 - August 23, 2013. There will be an opening reception on Wednesday, July 10, from 6 - 8pm. C24 Gallery's summer hours will be Monday - Friday, 10am - 6pm.
Katja Loher and Rohan Wealleans create other worlds or alternate universes, in which familiar objects are animated into strange and alien entities that have a life of their own. Their artistic processes allow the materials they use to convey a fantastical reality in their work.
This will be the first exhibition of Loher's ethereal videos in New York. Her work takes video out of the conventional context it is associated with, such as the black box or projection screen. The borders of her chimerical world exist within hanging, hand blown glass bubbles, dining room tables and chairs, wine carafes, and wall-mounted structures. She refers to her concept of creating idealized artificial worlds that sit in harmony with our own reality that is often unpleasant as "aggressive beauty." Loher films her subjects against a green screen, choreographing dancers dressed in costumes of her design. Accompanied by peculiar soundtracks, her characters appear to have gracefully landed on earth like sparkling molecules of a technicolor rainbow. "My video sculptures attempt to free the moving image from technology," states Loher, "I see art as a language, and technology is merely auxiliary."
New Zealand-based artist Rohan Wealleans is best known for his monstrous and colorful creations that employ paint as a transformative force that reaches beyond the realm of the ordinary into a reality that could be based in science fiction. Wealleans often uses the body as a canvas, painting and bedazzling figures in order to create characters rooted in the otherworldly. Other Voices will present a series of works the artist refers to as "Horror-gami," movie posters and comic book sized works that have been charged with talismanic powers and energy. He infuses these works with a dense multi-layered mythology transforming paint on canvas or paper into living, breathing creatures from another dimension that continue to mutate. Also on view will be a series of new gouache paintings that explore similar notions of both physical and psychic transmutation.
