Molly Gochman
Spring
March 14 – May 7 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 14, from 6:00 to 9:00 pm
Performances: Amy Granat, Jacob Kassay and Mai Ueda, Saturday, March 14, 9:00pm

Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to premier Spring, a conceptual project by Houston artist Molly Gochman. That same evening New York-based artists Amy Granat, Jacob Kassay and Mai Ueda will also perform at the gallery.

Spring focuses on a series of large-scale images derived from Kodachrome slides of Molly Gochman’s mother. Gochman revisits images and memories of her childhood, exploring the difference between the surviving photographs and her own reminiscences. She looks at the past from today’s perspective and develops a project that is abstract and philosophical while at the same time profoundly personal.  Gochman is fascinated by the concepts of time and change: the stains or cleansing that time imposes on images, on memory, and on the human self. She turns her images into extraordinary artworks that also become metaphors of time’s impact on matter. They are monuments to loss, but also to optimism. The title of the exhibition can be read as a reference to when the original images were taken and when the exhibition takes place. It speaks of the possibility for change and rebirth.

During the opening, a memory collage will be built with documents provided by those who attend. The collage will be built through the process of scanning and projecting documents kindly brought to the opening by visitors. To participate, please bring any images or other documents relating to memories in your life that you would like to add to the collage. Photographic images, texts, drawings, found pieces of paper or other very thin objects that measure less than 9″ x 9″ will be the easiest to incorporate. Your document will be returned to you after it has been scanned.

In the last five years, Gochman’s work has been exhibited as far away as the Sara Roney Gallery in Sydney, Australia, and in various galleries throughout her home state of Texas, including Barbara Davis Gallery, DiverseWorks, and her own space in Houston, Commune. In August of 2008, Gochman inaugurated Deborah Colton Gallery’s new location with the opening of Release: Give-Away III. Last year Gochman had an installation/performance at chashama and took part in the group exhibition ‘Engendered’ at Lincoln Center, both in New York.

Performances by artists Amy Granat and Mai Ueda will pre-feature a group exhibition, InCoherence, curated by Liutauras Psibilskis, that will take place at Deborah Colton Gallery in November – December 2009.  Amy Granat is a filmmaker and multimedia artist who exhibited at such venues as Swiss Institute, White Columns and PS1; she took part in Whitney Biennale 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is a co-founder of Cinema Zero, a collective that fosters collaborations between artists from different mediums. Mai Ueda is a performance and multimedia artist. She showed at Lyon Biennale 2001, Lyon, France, Palais De Tokyo, Paris, PS1, New York, Fargfabriken, Stockholm, Sweden; she used to be part of Electronic Orphanage in Los Angeles. Molly Gochman will also be an artist featured in InCoherence

Deborah Colton Gallery is founded on being an innovative showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists world-wide, whose diverse practices include painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, photography, performance, conceptual future media and public space installations. The Gallery aspires to provide a forum through connecting Texas, national and international artist s to make positive change.