Our Daily Homage

Eric Carson, mark daughhetee, jenny fillius

Reception and Artist Talks Thursday April 9th 6-9pm

With sculpture, drawing and painting, Eric Carson, Mark Daughhetee, and Jenny Fillius each work with found mythology to suggest themes of reclamation and devotion in our contemporary world.

Eric Carson uses the format of the mandala [the Hindu/Buddhist ritualistic design that organizes a spiritual experience in visual terms] to symbolically connect the world’s religions to each other, and to comment on the intersection of those beliefs with political and cultural issues. The way these line-based drawings are made—as well as their content—suggests a hybrid of references, from Western cartoons to Hieronymus Bosch to Hindu devotional painting. Carson writes, “These pieces present insight traditions around the world as petals of the same flower, not creeds to divide by or kill for.”

Mark Daughhetee’s Stations series of assemblage sculptures pay homage to old TV shows like Bonanza and The Lawrence Welk Show. Plastic cowboys stand stoically among clumps of hobby shop moss under a peaked roof. The format is reminiscent of compositions from the Renaissance and inspired by roadside memorials, as well as Thai spirit houses. Humor, child-like reverence for TV, and manhood (as defined by old Hollywood) are the main characters. Daughhetee writes, “Like one’s journey through life, each television program, in its turn, occupied center stage for a while and left when the curtain fell for the last time.”

Describing her process, Jenny Fillius writes “Being observant, anything can trigger an idea—an overheard expression, something on the street, an experience, the metal, a broken tin toy; literally anything.” Fillius finds and repurposes decorative sheet metal in the form of broken toys and used tin food containers to make sculptures suggestive of the retablos of Mexican folk art. Since most of the metal Fillius uses appears to have come from one’s childhood, or one’s parent’s childhood, the narratives that ensue are partly-articulated hints that nostalgia has gone awry in some way that we in 2015 are privy to.

– Susanna Bluhm, Gallery Director