lit-upness // mute acquiescence: morgran rosskopf and katherine spinella at the cawein gallery
The Cawein Gallery is pleased to announce a joint exhibition of work by artists Morgan Rosskopf and Katherine Spinella from January 26 to February 16.
We will be hosting an opening and reception on February 2 from 4-5 p.m. and invite Pacific University, Forest Grove, and the surrounding communities to join us.
About the Artists:
Katherine Spinella
b. 1985 / Detroit, MI
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Utilizing print media and relief sculpture in my studio, I choose objects to cast, photograph, and print that possess a pleasant sort of uselessness, spirited artifice, or aggressive cheeriness. Candy colored extension cords power nothing, banner flags celebrate a phony patch of grass, and casts of Jell-O molds become the epitome of nature tamed. These displays point to the heaviness of gravity, my body and the fallacy of human dominance/mastery over nature.
Through abstraction and image-object placement, these projects look at what a still life is, considering life stilled, distilled and concentrated into the quiet physicality of objects. By exploring these forms and their presence through color and materials I look at ideology embedded in the physicality of objects and environments.
Morgan Rosskopf
b. 1987 / Los Angeles, CA
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Working as a visual hunter-gatherer, I utilize methods of collage to construct odd, fragmented representations of mental states and internal monologues. My work is triangulated between my studio practice, my subconscious, and my experiences, interpreted and synthesized in the act of making. Inspired by methodologies of surrealist drawing, I engage with the work in an intuitive manner, responding to the wants and needs of the drawings as they get created. The push and pull between us during the process of making is what ultimately leads to the drawing’s completion, revealing and questioning hierarchies of cognition, and repositioning my awareness to see things I could not before.
My work investigates feelings of anxiety, dissonance, vulnerability, and love as told through the internal monologue. Because there is no objective referent of comparison for these emotions, we are left to describe them using metaphor, making this area of language very fluid and difficult to pin down. I am particularly interested in illustrating how we tell the story of our lives to ourselves and how we inadvertently live by the metaphors we create. Our internal monologues hold great power; they shape our reality and reshape our memories, consolidating experiences, thoughts, dreams, and emotions into a somehow unified psychology.