At this June's Art Murmur, Johansson Projects presents The Echo Fields, a debut exhibition featuring the work of Val Britton and Michael Meyers. In the second gallery the internationally acclaimed husband-and-wife team, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, offer an exploration of social roles, stereotypes, typecasting and genres.
In the main gallery a fantastical universe of abstract mark-making, route-lines and surreal sculptures allude to the fluid territory between the knowable and the unknown. Val Britton melds a cartographer’s precision with a dreamer’s sense of abandon to create map-like constructions that chart her journeys through the blurry terrain of memory and imagination. Layers of paint, ink and cut-outs are at once explosive and serene, echoing the paths she traces and re-traces in an effort to chart out familiar territory in a chaotic, uncertain world. Michael Meyers considers how we construct views of ourselves by receiving and expressing information. With existential humor, he sculpts tools for looking (telescopic) and tools for projecting (megaphonic). Solid wooden objects are made malleable with hinges and folds, dissolving sure geometry into ambiguous organic forms. His work suggests that communication and perception are too mutable to grasp from a single vantage point.
Val Britton received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from California College of the Arts. Widely exhibited both nationally and internationally, her work is held in several public collections including the New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, the Library of Congress, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Recent exhibitions include the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, San Jose Museum of Art, Pharmaka, Los Angeles, the Newcomb Art Gallery, Tulane University, KN Gallery, Chicago and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Sleek Magazine (Berlin) and Artweek. It will be included in Katharine Harmon’s forthcoming book, Cartography: Artists + Maps, in winter 2009.
Michael Meyers has created kinetic stage sculptures for the Whitney Biennial and the Lyon Opera Ballet and has contributed to collaborative installations at the Richmond Art Center and the Headlands Center for the Arts. He is a Pollock-Krasner Artist Grant recipient.
In the second gallery Johansson Projects presents work by internationally acclaimed husband-and-wife team, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. The McCoy’s multimedia artworks examine the genres and conventions of filmmaking, memory and language. They are best known for constructing subjective databases of existing material and teasing the viewers mind to examine reality. The duo invite you into unsettling fantasy worlds through their elaborately constructed miniature film sets with lights, video cameras and moving sculptural elements that create live cinematic events. The McCoy’s work has been widely exhibited in the US and internationally. Recent exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the British Film Institute in London, The Beall Center in Irvine, CA, pkm Gallery in Beijing, the San Jose Museum of Modern Art, the Nevada Museum of Art and Artists Space in New York. Their art is held in numerous museum collections including the Metropolitan, NY MoMA, Milwaukee Art Museum and MUDAM in Luxembourg. Articles about their work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The New York Times, The Wire, dArt International, Wired Magazine, and The Independent.