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Two shows exploring how compulsion can be transformed from a private coping mechanism to deal with a maddeningly repetitive world into transcendent works of art to be shared.

Johansson Projects presents two art exhibitions. Collective Compulsions: the winter group show and a solo exploration by Zach Houston in the back gallery.

When we are faced with intricate visual detail, we are compelled to look closer, and sink into a meditative contemplation of the discipline necessary to create such work. Stepping back from the image, the meticulously built forms disappear into the context of the whole. In Johansson Projects' new survey, the rooms full of laborious process and obsessive mark-making by the 13 artists co-mingle with a year and half of equally meticulous cultivation by the gallery. In addition to traditional forms such as painting and drawing, there is a play of unorthodox materials and methods such as medical tape and elaborate paper cuts. Delicate, dense, panoramic memory maps stretch before us in one piece, only to collapse into spiraling abstractions made from domestic items in the next.
In the back gallery, Zach Houston's solo show, the obsessive aesthetic as coping method is explored from a different, more intimate and linguistic orientation. Houston offers a selection from his vast archive of stream of consciousness diagrammatic investigations that concern themselves with the ancient past, thickest present and distant future.

COLLECTIVE COMPULSIONS: THE WINTER GROUP SHOW features:

Jen Stark, Jill Gallenstein, Kristina Lewis, Amanda Hughen, Anna Fidler, Tadashi Moriyama, Andrew Benson, Michael Meyers, Yvette Molina, Katy Stone and Misa Inaoka (Courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery).

IN THE PROJECT SPACE:

SAD LITTLE QUIET PSYCHOTOPOGRAPHY

Featuring: Zach Houston