Colleen Donohoe
November 18, 2016 – December 11, 2016
a solid home base builds a sense of self
new work by Holden Brown & Jessica Machacek
“Why are we vulnerable, so inconveniently vulnerable, to what the spaces we inhabit are saying?”
Both millennial artists in this exhibition consider the deceptive aesthetics of contemporary American domesticity. They build environments that mimic our own. They use familiar materials to create familiar places. These artists are skeptical of the idea of the American Dream as much are they are seduced by the aesthetics of it.
Jessica Machacek creates beautifully crafted installations that are both hyper representational and delightfully abstract. Her use of recognizable domestic products and materials is subtly critical yet entirely reverent. Objects that we recognize from the natural world have been commercially reproduced to suit our domestic environments. Machacek’s work embraces the aesthetics of the very consumer culture that it critiques to create pleasing geometric product-scapes out of faux-nature.
Holden Brown views American domesticity through a decidedly more sinister lens in his visual explorations of the commercial and cinematic depictions of American Suburbs. A new media and installation artist, Brown’s background in film & video is evident in his carefully curated domestic environments.
