OPENING ON FRIDAY, July 11, 5 - 9 pm

July 11- August 31, 2008
 Artists' Reception, Friday, July 11, 7 - 9 pm
Main Gallery - Daniel Duford, The Naked Boy
Left Gallery - Dave McKenzie, Present Tense
Gallery Four - Selections from The Studio Program, Craig Dongoski, Tim Hunter, Eric Mack
Round Gallery - Susan Silton, The Five W's

Saturday, July 12, 11 am
Artist Lecture: Daniel Duford, Dave McKenzie, Susan Silton
$5 Admission, Free to members

Thursday, July 24, 7 pm
Artist Talks: Craig Dongoski, Tim Hunter, Eric Mack
Free admission

Daniel Duford, The Naked Boy, 2003-07

Main Gallery
Daniel Duford, The Naked Boy

The Naked Boy is a graphic novel that Daniel Duford began in 2003, incorporating over 200 action-packed drawings made with graphite and ink wash. It is a labor-intensive production that coincides with the artist’s work in figurative sculpture, public art projects, and wall murals. In recent years, his creative output has been inspired by the psychology of flawed heroes, the American landscape, and politics, including the Iraq war and prisoner conditions at Guantanamo Bay. His work connects to various contemporary artists including Sue Coe, Kerry James Marshall, and William Kentridge, who each use drawing as a flexible tool for examining and critiquing social realities. 

Duford is fascinated by comic book traditions and Native American mythology, and his training in ceramics gives him a unique sense of forming and fragility. He has contributed poetry and cultural writing to several Oregon-based publications, and The Naked Boy allows him a space where bold drawing and storytelling styles combine in elaborately staged sequences of establishing shots, midrange scene development, and dynamic close-ups of figurative fragments, dialogue, and emotional utterances.

The Naked Boy examines the history of America and its various social and political developments during the past 100 years. It is a complex mythological story that combines several historical periods simultaneously. Witch trials and robber barons, crows and evangelical preachers mix it up while the protagonist matures and follows his destiny to understand the circumstances of his birth and his role in the world.

At the Contemporary, the artist will develop a setting for the entire sequence of The Naked Boy drawings to date, including wall works, comic books, and several low-fired ceramic sculptures that personify figures in the narrative, including Walt Whitman in a flood, and Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter. The installation will present Duford’s cautionary tale of manifest destiny, democracy, and selfinvention in a shifting space between looking, reading, fact, and fantasy.

Daniel Duford lives and works in Portland, Oregon. His work has been exhibited at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and B Street Gallery, all in Portland, Oregon; and the Art Gym at Marylhurst University, Marylhurst, Oregon. His project Sleeping Giant will be performed with Lawrence Goldhuber and Mark Orton at the Henry Street Settlement in New York in October of 2008.

Dave McKenzie, Present Tense (video still), 2007

Dave McKenzie, Present Tense (video still), 2007

New York-based artist Dave McKenzie works in a variety of media—sculpture, video, painting, and performance, playfully or provocatively examining conditions of race, masculinity, time, and place. His own image and body often take center stage in various combinations of public hiding or intimate access. In While Supplies Last (2003), he donned a giant papier-mâché mask of himself and gave away miniature ‘Dave’ bobble-head dolls to passers-by. In Self-Portrait Piñata (2002), a performance and video, a hanging ‘Dave’ piñata is bashed to smithereens by numerous competing children. Performances of I’ll Be There, (2007), featured McKenzie meeting the public at various locales which were pre-printed in a day planner that indicated where he would be and when.

Present Tense (2007) is a video projection that features the artist in various representational and psychological states. In a stop-time animation, a McKenzie ‘doll’ sits on a park bench and encounters an Andy Warhol action figure. The two consider the possibilities of self-transformation in a dialog that is both awkward and tender. Inspired by Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), and the 1964 children’s film, The Incredible Mr. Limpet, starring Don Knotts, Present Tense is an extended meditation on the male body and creative process, a kind of metaphysical therapy session where McKenzie comes to terms with anxiety, influence, and his own expectations about making art. The video presents him in modes of contemplation and exhilaration, occupying urban and domestic space in static and dynamic ways while he examines several of his past sculptures and projects. It is a self-survey of an emerging oeuvre, one that has had its share of accolades; given the work’s title, it establishes concern as well as contentment.

Dave McKenzie lives and works in New York. He has held residencies at the P.S.1 National Studio Program and the Studio Museum in Harlem, both in New York; and solo exhibitions at galleries including Small A Projects, Portland, Oregon; 40,000 Gallery, Chicago; and Susanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles. He was awarded the 2005 William H. Johnson Prize for outstanding achievement by an African-American artist, and was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2006.

Craig Dongoski, Eye (detail) , 2007


Tim Hunter, Vanishing Songbirds (detail), 2007


Eric Mack, TZKO-225 (detail), 2007

This exhibition focuses on three artists who are currently part of our unique Studio Artists Program. Craig Dongoski's drawings and prints utilize fields of repeated gestures that establish unique rhythms and manipulations of space. Simultaneous with these works, are various investigations using recorded sound and voice. The interconnectivity of these interests provides Dongoski's work with a lively exchange between the handmade and the technological. He has lived and worked in Atlanta since June 1999, teaching painting and drawing at Georgia State University.

Tim Hunter's work focuses on bird species whose populations are in decline because of loss of habitat. He has used asphalt, cement, and carved wood panels to depict these birds, updating John James Audubon's classic renderings. Hunter links materials, and processes of removal, with environmental threat. His work has been shown at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama; the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science, Tallahassee, Florida; and featured in the publication New American Paintings.

Eric Mack makes vibrant paintings and collages that incorporate various magazine and newspaper fragments of color and text, mixed with materials applied by brush and aerosol. His canvases make reference to traditions including Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and graffiti. His work has been shown at galleries including Tilford Art Group, Los Angeles; Brecht Forum Gallery, New York; and Wertz Contemporary and Fay Gold Gallery, both in Atlanta. He recently completed a project at Atlanta's Hartsfield Jackson Airport.

Los Angeles-based artist Susan Silton uses various forms of public address to examine conditions of authority, architecture, and interruption. Her recent projects have included elaborate tenting of museums in brightly colored striped fabric, which adds a carnivalesque gaiety to usually sober institutional structures. She has also produced and disseminated postcards with disturbing texts borrowed from American and British military leaflet bombings over Iraq in 2003–04. One card contains the phrase, “Your Future Is The Sunlight That Will Scatter Them Like Cockroaches Into The Darkness Of The Past,” printed in black on hot pink with a decorative border. Translated into English from the original Arabic, this text is a troubling assertion, and one can only imagine how thousands of such statements would affect a citizenry if dropped from the air, a practice of psychological operations used since World War II.

In the Round Gallery, she will create a site-specific installation called The Five W’s, referencing the key journalistic conditions that should be present in the relating of any story: who, what, where, when, and why. Silton complicates and challenges the existence of these ideal questions by embedding the words within an intensely optical pattern of black and white. Printed on postcards ‘endlessly’ stacked for the viewer to take, they suggest unlimited bounty as well as obfuscation and hidden agenda. The cards are positioned within similarly painted enclosures in the gallery, further problematizing the relationships between message and messenger, and individual and institution.

Susan Silton lives and works in Los Angeles. She has exhibited her work at the Pasadena Museum of California Art; Solway Jones Gallery, Los Angeles; Angles Gallery, Santa Monica; Feigen Contemporary, New York; and SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2005, she received a Getty/California Community Foundation Fellowship.