LAURIE HOGIN HAZE
Location: 1056 S. Fairfax Ave at Pico & Olympic, Los Angeles, CA

Thursday, October 14 | 6:30pm
Conversation with Laurie, LA-based artist Monica Nouwens & CA Senator Sydney Kamlager on the intersection of art and politics.
Please RSVP to [email protected] as space is limited.

Koplin Del Rio Gallery is pleased to present HAZE, an exhibition of new works by Laurie Hogin, in our hometown of Los Angeles during a weeklong pop-up. Best known for her allegorical paintings of mutant plants and animals in languishing, poisoned landscape settings or posed as though for classical still life or portraiture, Hogin continues her examination of human (though not uniquely so) experiences and impulses like love, pleasure, desire, trauma, anger, obsession, addiction, violence, and grief, especially as they are manifest in the current social, political, and environmental moment, using narrative imagery to represent and discuss their consequences. Combining various tropes from the history of painting, natural history and scientific display, portraiture, entertainment, advertising, propaganda, and various strategies of political representation such as flag colors and group-identity iconology with satirical or poetic metaphors, she describes political, social, economic, environmental, and emotional phenomena that structure our experiences and portend our possible futures. She cites the political cartoons of historical artists such as Hogarth, Goya, and Daumier as precedents, but the work engages with more recent representational strategies such as pastiche and metaphor as well as engaging contemporary forms of knowledge, such as cognitive neuroscience, new understandings of the relationship of the body to consciousness, and environmental awareness, to craft images that hypothesize about the broad effects of human impulses.

The exhibition’s title, HAZE, is a word that can refer to air pollution from industry or wildfires, a mental state of ignorant or confused transcendence, or an act of harassment or “gaslighting”. Its multiple meanings introduce some of the exhibition’s main topics while also referring to the artist’s strategy of using symbols, signs, icons, and metaphors to carry multiple, sometimes seemingly contradictory, or synthetic meanings. Such strategies mimic the language of the unconscious; dream language, appearing in all forms of art making and other cultural messaging that structures and orients human identity and behavior.