THE NOW FOREVER

Art Exhibition in Basilica Back Gallery
Curated by Michael St. John with Tyler Moore, Javier Magri + Carol McCranie

Artist: Alex McQuilkin, Untitled (for Alice), 2015, 42.5″ x 49″ (Detail).

Opening Reception (part of Basilica SoundScape) | Friday, September 11, 6-8 PM
Special Event: Discussion with Curators | Sunday, September 27, 6-8 PM
Gallery Hours | Saturdays + Sundays from September 11 – October 4, 12-5 PM + by appointment

“The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise. It has caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned,while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” – Walter Benjamin

With the desire to invent… always weaving towards the new, the future must be made. Failure is not an option. It’s as simple as that.

Now is new
Now is the present
Now is the expectation of change
Now is history
Now is tomorrow
Now is living
Now is alive
Now is mortal
Now is forever
Now is the time

Artists
David Alekhuogie
Nate Lowman
Nathaniel Robinson
Josh Smith
Borna Sammak
Fox Hysen
Harmony Korine
Brock Enright
Haley Mellin
Dennis Dawson
Alex McQuilkin
Suzanne McClelland
Michael St.John

David Alekhuogie (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) is a Chicago based artist, photographer, writer, and educator. Alekhuogie attended the University of California at Berkeley where he received a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and ethnomusicology before his transition to art-making. Alekhuogie’s  work has been published in The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Source, Complex, Vice and Fader. Alekhuogie received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus in Photography in 2013 and received his MFA from Yale University in 2015.  Alekhuogie’s multi-disciplinary practice is centered on photography and investigates memory, technology, media, and power.

Nate Lowman was born in 1979 in Las Vegas and received a BS from New York University in 2001. His work employs strategies of collage and appropriation, often incorporating and manipulating contemporary visual elements and artifacts such as graffiti, print media, and bumper stickers. The resulting critique of culture reflects on issues such as the cult of celebrity, material consumption, and violence. Lowman has had solo exhibitions at Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2006); Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2009); and The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2012). His work has been included in notable group exhibitions, including those at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), New York (2005); Hessel Museum of Art and the Center for Curatorial Studies, both at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2006); Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); the Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art (2007); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2007, 2010); Busan Biennial, South Korea (2008); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2010); the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2011); and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2014). Lowman lives and works in New York City.

Nathaniel Robinson was born in Rhode Island in 1980. He studied painting at Amherst College, and in 2005 received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Questions about the nature of knowledge and observation, rooted in early interests in philosophy, science, and plein-air painting, have been a consistent undercurrent in his work.  From 2010 to 2014 he was represented by Feature Inc., is currently represented by Devening Projects + Editions in Chicago, and will mount a solo exhibition in December 2015 at Launch F18 in New York.  His work has also been exhibited in Brussels, Leipzig, St. Paul, Philadelphia, Istanbul, Dusseldorf, and Melbourne.

Josh Smith (b. 1976) is from Knoxville, Tennessee and lives and works between Pennsylvania and New York. He has had several solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad, most notably The American Dream at The Brant Foundation in Greenwich, CT in 2011, Josh Smith at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2009, Who Am I at De Hallen Haarlem in 2009, and Hidden Darts at MUMOK in Vienna in 2008. He has also participated in important group exhibitions such as The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Le Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse, ILLUMInations in the 2011 Venice Biennale, The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum in New York, and MoMA’s The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World. His works are in numerous public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, MUMOK, Vienna, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Borna Sammak (b. 1986, Philadelphia, PA) is a video installation artist who also works with a variety of media, mostly found. For “The Now Forever” Sammak includes a painting from his Beach Crap series which consists of heat applied t-shirt graphics such as those found in boardwalk souvenir shops. Consistently interested in the reposing of existing commercial language, Sammak rips apart the slogans on these t-shirt decals to make his own, often fucking with the original, punch line. Sammak has recently exhibited with JTT, Andrea Rosen, Oko, Gagosian, The National Gallery of Victoria, Marianne Boesky and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art.

Fox Hysen was born in northern California, she earned her BFA from NYU in 2006 and her MFA from Yale University in 2015. She has had solo shows in New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. Fox Hysen uses the surface of the painting as a playing field for acting out narrative contradictions. A piece of newsprint or canvas pasted on seemingly haphazardly begins to behave like an image and vise versa images of artworks are reduced to scraps of paper. Through the use of collage and through the unexpected combination of materials and images she produces a diverse body of work that is both whimsical and austere.

Harmony Korine was born in Bolinas, California in 1973. His films include Kids (1995, written by Korine, directed by Larry Clark); Gummo (1997, written and directed by Korine); Julien Donkey-Boy(1999, written and directed by Korine); Ken Park (2002, written by Korine, directed by Larry Clark and Ed Lachman); Mister Lonely(2007, written by Korine, co-directed with Avi Korine); Trash Humpers (2009, written and directed by Korine); and Spring Breakers (2012, written and directed by Korine). Solo and two-person exhibitions of his films, photographs, and paintings include Patrick Painter, Santa Monica, CA (1997, 2000); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium (2000); “Harmony Korine-pigxote,” Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, Nashville, TN (2009); and “Rita Ackermann and Harmony Korine: Shadow Fux,” Swiss Institute, New York (2010-2011). His work was included in “Présumés Innocents, l’art contemporain et l’enfance,” CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (2001); “Beautiful Losers,” Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (2004); “SONIC YOUTH etc. : SENSATIONAL FIX,” Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2009); and “Altars of Madness,” Casino Luxembourg Forum d’art contemporain (2013). Korine’s novel, A Crack Up at the Race Riots, was published by Mainstreet/Doubleday in 1998. Pass the Bitch Chicken: Christopher Wool & Harmony Korine, a book of collaborative images, was released by Holzwarth Publications in 2002. His work was included in the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Korine lives and works in Nashville, TN.

Brock Enright (USA, b. 1976 in Norfolk, VA) received his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 1998 and his MFA in 2001 from Columbia University. Enright has held solo shows at Kate Werble Gallery, NY; White Flag Projects, St. Louis, MO; Perry Rubenstein Gallery, NY; and Vilma Gold Gallery, London, UK. His work has been exhibited at venues including MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Mitchell-Ines & Nash, New York, NY; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; LACE, Los Angeles, CA; Halle 14, Leipzig, DE; Anton Kern Gallery, NY; Bregenzer Kunstverein, Bregenz, AT; and the Royal Academy of Art, London, UK. Enright is the subject of a 2009 feature length documentary titled Good Times Will Never Be The Same. He currently lives and works in upstate New York.

Haley Mellin (USA, born in San Francisco CA) received her BA from UC Berkeley in 2004 and a PhD in Visual Culture in 2012. She was a member of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Recent shows include Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Belgium; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali, Italy; and Retrospective, New York.  She has an upcoming solo project at Bischoff. She currently lives and works in New York and San Francisco.

Dennis Dawson, an Ohio born artist, has exhibited work extensively in New York and Internationally since 2001. His large scale paintings and works on paper employ highly worked and exaggerated surfaces that highlight the vernacular and hint at a sense of place. His work has been included most recently in New York at Frosch and Portmann Gallery, Stux Gallery, and at the Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s Island. Dawson received his MFA from the University of Tennessee and currently lives and works in the New York metro area.

Alex McQuilkin’s work has exhibited internationally since 2000. Her videos, drawings and sculptures explore themes such as the role of pop culture imagery in defining female identity and the power structures embedded within artifice. Recent highlights include solo exhibitions in NY and Germany and group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, KW Institute in Berlin, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, and Centre Pompidou in Paris. McQuilkin’s work has been reviewed in the NY Times, the Village Voice, Flash Art, Art Magazine, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from New York University and is currently a professor of art at NYU and The New School.

Exhibiting internationally since the early 1990s, Suzanne McClelland’s practice includes both large-scale paintings and works on paper, often extracting fragments of speech or text from various political and cultural sources and exploring the symbolic and material possibilities that reside within language.  McClelland is represented by Team Gallery in New York and Shane Campbell gallery in Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at The Whitney Museum, both 2014 and 1993 Biennials; The New Museum, The Museum at University at Albany SUNY, The Fralin Museum of Art at University of Virginia, among others. Her work can be found in public and private collections including MOMA, The Walker, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum and Saatchi. A solo exhibition at the Aldrich Museum will begin in November 2016 and Team Gallery will publish a monograph in 2016 with contributions from Christopher Stackhouse and Thierry de Duve. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is currently on Faculty with School of Visual Arts Fine Arts, MFA Program.

American artist Michael St. John, who began his career as an abstract painter in the 1980s before moving on to found-object installations in the decade that followed, uses art as a way to comment on contemporary culture. His most recent works focus on the democratization of images by combining propaganda shots of smiling presidents with Google-searched girlie photos and the types of everyday imagery that we often overlook (bathroom graffiti, stickers on notebooks, lost dog signs). His canvases combine photocopies and found images with painted material in the trompe l’oeil style of 19th-century painter John Peto; his works simultaneously evoke Robert Rauschenberg’s combines, teenaged bulletin boards, and the artists’ studio itself. “Like watching the news,” St. John has said of his information-saturated works, “you are left to wonder what’s real and what’s not.”