Laurie Hogin received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. This is her 19th solo show and her third with Koplin Del Rio. 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.

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.