Koplin Del Rio Gallery is pleased to present Altered Scapes, a group exhibition of paintings, sculpture, and mixed media works influenced by earth’s landscape, and its rapid transformation. Featured in the exhibition are four artists: Phillip Govedare & Jodi Rockwell, both based in Seattle, Laurie Hogin, based in Chicago, and Josh Dorman from New York. The exhibition will be accompanied by a panel discussion in partnership with the UW’s Earthlab, focused around the relationship between art & the environment, and the potential of art to influence our understanding of climate change.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Philip Govedare

“My work evolved out of abstraction and as I worked further, it became clear to me that I was really painting landscape. At one point, I decided to embrace the subject with all its history, complexities, and layered meanings.” - PG

Bio

Philip Govedare(b.1954) has exhibited in the Seattle area for over 25 years, with solo exhibitions at Francine Seders Gallery (2013) and Prographica Gallery(2015). His work has been included in numerous institutional exhibitions with a focus on landscape and environmental issues, most recent Water’s Edge, Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA (2019) and SURGE Exhibition Partnership: Imagining Climate Futures, sponsored by University of Washington EarthLab, Skagit Climate Science Consortium at the Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner. Govedare has lectured extensively on his view of contemporary landscape painting nationally and internationally, and his artwork is represented in numerous public and private collections. He teaches at the University of Washington, lives and works in Seattle, WA.

Josh Dorman

Dorman’s works combine collaged elements clipped from antique topographic maps, textbooks, and how-to manuals with hand-drawn and painted passages in ink, acrylic, and graphite. They are at once minutely detailed and grandly fantastic visions of landscapes. By recontextualizing these antique images within drawn and painted worlds, Dorman aims to generate paintings that feel dislocated in time. Fastidiously rendered, his layerings remind us of our past histories, and future forecast set in our current anthropocene.

“Carving into the surface of my paintings has reminded me that play is crucial. After the 2016 election, I needed to break things, to construct an alternative reality to escape into. The new work allows me to push space, fantasy, and infinite detail, while also speaking about the catastrophe of climate change and the human impact on the planet.” - JD

Bio

Josh Dorman (b.1966) graduated from Skidmore College (BA) and Queens College (MFA). Dorman has had numerous solo exhibitions in Los Angeles (with Koplin Del Rio), New York and London. He is currently working with the Memory Bridge Foundation in Chicago on a project involving the “mapping” of the internal geographies and memories of Alzheimers and Dementia patients. His work is in many public and private collections including the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; the International Collage Center in Milton, Pennsylvania; The Naples Museum in Naples, Florida; and the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, Missouri. He teaches, lives and works in New York, NY.

Laurie Hogin

Hogin’s topics include love, pleasure, desire, attraction, and attachment, as well as anger, obsession, addiction, violence, and grief. These aspects of human experience and identity, resultant of the interplay of evolutionary biology and language, all find expression in the schizoid array of material culture, which express the unseen and (as yet) unobservable systems of material existence and human experience within it. Her allegorical animal species, especially bunnies, monkeys, and birds, continue to figure prominently; all are symbols of common projections of “nature”, a sort of cultural shorthand. Bunnies are creatures whose being functions as a symbolic vessel for human fantasies about cuteness and the pastoral. Monkeys, as in the history of art generally, represent humans’ “animal nature”, tendencies we share with primate cousins as a result of evolutionary networks of being, and birds engage in social behaviors often compared to that of humans.

“This work is one of an ongoing series referring to the history of habitat dioramas, a natural history museum practice that presented taxidermied species in narrative tableaux. The foreground, analogous to the stage set in a diorama, is full of candy-colored berries, cartoon flowers, and dying timber with fungi decorated like flag buntings, metaphors for political rot, or, more hopefully, political renewal. The animals, likewise, are stuck in their languishing environment, but their shapes and colors suggest Anthropocene evolution and adaptive diversity, and their gestures suggest agency—their story does not end here. - Laurie Hogin

Bio

Laurie Hogin (b. 1963) received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. Her work is exhibited regularly across the country and is in numerous private and public collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, the Illinois State Museum, The United States Federal Reserve, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Brauer Museum, Valparaiso, IN, the Racine Art Museum, WI, among many others. She is currently Professor with Tenure in the Painting and Sculpture Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Jodi Rockwell

“The cause and effect of fluid materials colliding with rigid surfaces creates a tension in this series of work reminiscent of land formations and the body. Gravity weighs on its form along with the interior liquid settling in the valleys and folds. Each container holds a memory of another place, time or psychological state. My work emphasizes the dual concept of the human experience as both highly personal and universal.”

Bio

Jodi Rockwell is a Seattle-based artist primarily working with ceramics and installation. She holds an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Washington [2001] and co-founded Rockland Residency with her partner, Shawn Landis, in 2015. Rockwell has exhibited locally and nationally for the past 20 years, notably as a solo artist at Bumbershoot Music & Arts Festival, The Henry Art Gallery, Soil Gallery and Vital 5 Productions in Seattle, WA, The Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, WA, and The Lab Gallery in NYC. Her functional pottery can be found locally at KOBO Shop & Gallery. Rockwell works out of three studios: Rockland Woods on the Kitsap peninsula where she runs artist residency programs, Lakeside Upper School where she teaches and JRock Studios at home in Seattle where she raises her family.