Deborah Colton Gallery

Reflections on the Noughties

July 1, 2017 – August 19, 2017

Opening Reception: Saturday July 1st 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to present Reflections on the Noughties, a group exhibit featuring a selection of

Michael Bise

Michael Bise was born in Flagstaff, Arizona and moved to Dallas, Texas in 1990. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in drawing and painting at the University of North Texas in 2001 and his Master of Fine Arts degree in drawing and painting at the University of Houston in 2005. His work has been shown at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Art Museum of Southeast Texas; the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas; and Fort Worth Contemporary Arts at TCU. He was a recipient of a Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant and an Artadia Finalist in 2014 and was awarded The Hunting Art Prize, an Artadia Finalist, and a Nominee for the Texas Contemporary Award in 2012. His work is part of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Houston Airport System, City of Houston, and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont.

Bise’s work consists of graphite drawings that combine autobiographical narrative with labor-intensive attention to detail, creating a disorienting relationship between personal psychology and formal picture making concerns.

Jessica Ciocci/PAPER RAD

With three primary members – Jacob Ciocci, Jessica Ciocci, and Ben Jones – Paper Rad are a collective dividing their time between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Providence, Rhode Island. At once affirmative and critical, their pieces posess an exuberantly neo-primitivist digital aesthetic. In keeping with their focus on current pop culture and media, Paper Rad synthesize popular material from television, video games, and advertising, making comics, zines, net art, video art, MIDI files, installations, paintings, and music.

Rachel Hecker

Rachel Hecker was born in Provedence, Rhode Island. She attended Moore College of Art, and after receiving her BFA in Sculpture, she returned to RI, where she got her MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently an Associate professor of painting at the University of Houston. Hecker has received considerable critical attention for her solo exhibitions in Texas venues, such as the Contemporary arts Museum in Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art, and ArtPace in San Antonio. Additionally, she has shown in commercial and university galleries and alternative spaaces throughout the United States. Hecker was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts award in Painting, and is currently represented in many public and private collections including the Houston, Dallas, and New Orleans Museums of Art.

Hecker’s work shares a common lineage rooted in the ancestral history of Pop art, but in contrast to Warhol and Lichtenstein who’s art operated according to a larger cultural scope, Hecker’s approach reflects concepts and concerns that express a more temporal intimacy. Most interesting though is how her work and practice transcends the Pop Art impulse. Whereas the common Pop Art canon seeks to expose the margin between consumers of high and mass culture by examining methods implicit of mass production, Hecker painstakingly recreates the machine-manufactured appearance by hand. In doing so, Hecker elevates the significance of time spent painting, adding a deeper conceptual component, so as to underscore the fleeting permanence between life and time.

Paul Horn

Paul Horn is a Houston based artist and curator best known for his three dimensional collages and sculptures that draw from images and motifs found in popular culture. His carefully orchestrated exhibitions often feature artwork in nontraditional exhibition environments as a means of re-contextualizing Pop Art within contemporary sensibilities. His work has been reviewed by the esteemed trifecta of art journals: Artforum, ARTnews, and Art in America. He also has had reviews in Houston Press, The Houston Chronicle, Artlies, and Glasstire.

Among Paul Horn’s numerous solo and group exhibitions are shows at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas, and the Contemporary Art Museum at the University of South Florida. He began his artistic career during his graduate studies at the University of Houston, where he also has been exhibited. Using venues from a Holiday Inn to an elevator carriage, and even a Quick Mart convenience store, he has not only made the art a focal point, but engages the viewer as part of the exhibition as well.

Daniel Johnston

Daniel Johnston has spent approximately the last 20 years exposing his heartrending tales of unrequited love, cosmic mishaps, and existential torment to an ever-growing international cult audience. Daniel was born in 1961 in Sacramento, California, and over the years, Daniel’s paintings and drawings have been exhibited in Los Angeles, Zurich, and Berlin. The cover of a recent edition of music writer Richard Meltzer’s “The Aesthetics of Rock” was drawn by Johnston. Throughout his career, Daniel’s songs and drawings have been informed to some degree by his ongoing struggle with manic depression — lending an added poignancy to his soul-searching times. In January, 2005, the feature-length documentary “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” premiered at Sundance Film Festival and at film festivals around the world that year. The movie was distributed in North America by Sony Pictures Classic and by Tartan Films in the United Kingdom on March 31, 2006.

Otabenga Jones & Associates

Otabenga Jones & Associates is a Houston-based artist collective founded in 2002 by artist and educator Otabenga Jones in collaboration with members Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evans, and Robert A. Pruitt. The group’s pedagogical mission is manifested in a myriad of forms, e.g. actions, writings, DJ sets, and installations. In scope the collective’s mission is three-fold: to underscore the complications of black representation, to maintain and promote the core principles of the Black radical tradition, and (in the words of the late Russell Tyrone Jones) “teach the truth to the young black youth”.

Work by Otabenga Jones & Associates has appeared in exhibitions at the Studio Museum of Harlem and Whitney Museum of American Art (Whitney Biennial), in New York City; the High Museum, Atlanta; and the Menil Collection and Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Houston, among others.

Francisco Larios

Born in Guaymas, Sonora 1960, Francisco Larios is a multidisciplinary artist whose work achieved exceptional notoriety in the Nineties, and has since gained him global acclaim. He has accumulated a plethora of awards and exhibitions recognizing his multidisciplinary abilities in painting, drawing, lithography, photography, and digital mediums. Included in these are the Biennial of Cuenca in Ecuador for digital idealizations of faith, science, and domestic violence, the Museum of Monterrey Biennial for painting, solo exhibitions across the globe, and a residency at the prestigious Polígrafa Gallery in Barcelona working with traditional printing techniques.

Larios’s competence across various visual mediums result in two and three-dimensional compositions, manifested from immemorial spiritual references and philosophical motifs, which reflect a critically poetic exploration of how cultural expressions and relationships have led to contemporary visual languages.

Patrick Palmer

Patrick studied at Heatherley’s School of Art in London and The National College of Art and Design in Dublin. He has studied under Michael Clark – a friend of Francis Bacon – and by Bobby Gill – an honourary fellow at The Royal College of Art. Whilst an element of realism is important, in the artist’s own words: “I move beyond artistic convention and avoid an image that is too predictable. Realism is not enough – what you take away and what you add to what you see are what transforms a picture into art. I believe that the viewer wants to see a degree of draughtsmanship from an artist, but they deserve more than this. I aspire to make my pictures touch people personally and to be considered simple works of beauty.”

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.