LAURA HOHLWEIN | DOCUMENTATION

L A U R A H O H L W E I N STATEMENTS

2009

"With and Without Walls" Solomon Dubnick, 2009

For the past several years, I have been creating very large-scale, energetic paintings whose prominent characteristic was the floating of images over other images across and up and back through the pictorial space. Sometimes the connection between images was loose or random. Sometimes the drifting images echoed the dominant image behind. My interest was in how consciousness adjusts to the actual present observed and how we can see, both actually and psychologically, multiple things at once as, when remembering a face, one still sees the room one is in. Or, how when looking up at a cloudscape, one is still experiencing, and in some way seeing, the road that led to that vista point. Recently, I have focused this inquiry on a particular old farmhouse in eastern Long Island a place of deep history, close proximity to nature, and of essential psychological importance to me personally. The house has recently been razed so many of the paintings have to do with the dismantling of space and its psychological structures, the unmooring of memory, and with the eternal forces of nature that both pre-exist and rush to fill any void of structure or meaning. Here, multiple points of perspective, some dimensional, some identifiable, some lost, transparent or abstract, have become less about individual consciousness and more about the commonality of this experience of having had and having lost meaningful personal space, of surrendering ourselves, willingly or not, to the ultimate dominance (and beauty) of the forces of nature.

2007

"Rubble" O.K. Centrum • Linz, Austria 2007

As an artist, I have long been interested in the phenomenology of experience, the relationship of consciousness to all that is immediately available to it. Previous paintings have considered the imaging process of the mind, how the three-dimensional (in my opinion) experience of thought and memory might relate to the two dimensional surface of the picture plane.Recent work has taken expanded on this interest with the aim of involving the viewer more directly and experientially (spatially and over time) with a slowly evolving dimensional piece. These are my first forays into three-dimensionality, my first attempts at working with experience itself as part of my palette.A recent installation, "Rubble," moves away from the imaging of the individual mind to discuss more collective experience, the collective experience of devastations of all kinds. Here a large mound of images of destruction that we see everyday (and perhaps have grown numb to) pictures of my own losses complicated losses inextricable jumbled up therein, occupies much of the exhibition space. Bit by bit, over several days, I rearrange the pile, putting the images up on a wall, with increasing difficulty as the images at the bottom of the pile are very thin, fragile, almost dust. The image created on the wall is one of nature: simple, enduring, existing before and beyond our sufferings and our great forgetting.Though drawn to the potential of time-based media, - the physicality, and relative uselessness of things left behind, interests me at the moment. I believe in this particularly wasteful period historically it is important to relate our stories to one another and to not overlook the gift that our individual lives are, however vulnerable and fleeting. I feel it is important for me to involve people physically and experientially with artworks. It is my aim to rekindle appreciation for the priviledge and ultimate mystery of simple experience.

2004

"A Visibility of Thought" Phoenix Gallery, NYC 2004

["Experience] is a visibility of thoughtin which hundreds of eyes in one mindsee at once". Wallace StevensThe paintings in this room are the first iterations of an idea that has been interesting me for some time. Prior to this series, I was painting very large-scale, energetic, pure abstractions whose prominent characteristic was the floating of shapes across and up and back through the pictorial space. I believe the paintings were successful, but wanted to explore more the implications of what I knew those shapes referred to thinking, the process of thinking, how consciousness adjusts to the actual present observed.I want to know how we really see, not just physically, but how consciousness itself sees and I dont think it sees just one thing. Its sees the present, the complex and beautiful physical reality before it. It sees the less distinct, but still visible bits of memory. It senses its own energy and movement. It senses areas of vagueness or forgetting. The subject is elusive, but fascinating to me.How is it, for example that we can be looking at the corner of a table and, at the same time, see the yard we played in as a child? How do our preoccupations fill a room as we enter it? Why is thinking visual and in what way is it visual? Do our thoughts travel across the space of our minds? Do thoughts move through any space at all? If not, why do I sense such dimensionality? Further, if what is actually seen and what is felt seen were BOTH actually seen, how might these elements relate to one another visually?In these paintings, multiple points of perspective, or fragments of language, or layers of images, some dimensional, some identifiable, some lost or transparent or abstract, (but all culled from personal sources: previous writings or paintings or photographs of revisted places), represent, to me, our many simultaneous modes of experiencing and processsing the moment, the highly recursive creative process, and the accomodation of all these things, somehow, with our understanding of who we are individually.In addition to this, as a painter, I am interested in the simple formal resolution of the dynamics on the canvas, in light and form and color. So, here, light and thought, line and language, color and nature, drift and interweave, come towards us and receed into a space that remains mysterious even as we look right at it. Again, Wallace Stevens guides me here. He writes, "(She) wanted that/- to face the weather /and be unable to tell how much of it was light/ and how much thought."

2009
2007
2004

REVIEWS

Artweek

"Abstract Reality' at Solomon Dubnick", David Roth, Artweek, June 2003 - excerpt

In a region where figuration and funk have long held sway, it's hard not to be curious when a gallery that leans toward those genres decides to unveil an exhibit of nearly ninety abstract works by six artists. Though the show carries no discernable theme other than what's indicated by the title, it hits most of the bases implied by that designation: works that are loosely representational, non-objective, quasi-figurative and non-representational. What we get is the equivalent of six one-person shows. [...]Gesture, geometry, color and an attraction/repulsion relationship with the city are the ostensible subjects for painter Laura Hohlwein. The convergence of these interests yields paintings that are festive and forebeoding. They appear to originate as darkly shaded geometrical abstractions like outlined urban grids viewed from on high. But overtop these grids, Hohlwein applies tropically colored geometrical shapes whose interiors are distressed and edges are either sharp or blurred. This collision of apparent opposites keeps the viewer engaged, but also off-balance and out-of-focus, a dynamic that effectively conveys an ambivalence about urbanity. [...]Abstract Reality is an ambitious undertaking that showcases some exceptional artists. [...]

The Journal

"Sight and Sound " - Tricia Lynn Strader, The Journal, August 2003 - excerpt

[...] Curator McBee (of the Morgan Arts Council in Berkeley Springs, WV) says she was inspired to create the show (Visual Interpretations of Sound and Music) while working on assignment for the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She had a vision of a show in which art relates to music.[...] Laura Hohlwein has sent three 6-foot-tall paintings. Educated both in th U.S. and Europe, she has exhibited in Montecastello di Vibio, Italy, California and New York."What I'm most interested in as a painting problem is how to capture in color and form and space a sense of what it feels like to be alive - experiencing the world, responding to the present," Hohlwein said in an e-mail interview. "Music is the most abstract of the arts and, therefore, abstract painting has, I believe, much in common with it."Hohlwein says she always listens to music when she paints. "...my original approach to painting, laying down the rythmic composition of the work, is almost a kind of dance. As the painting evolves from an active 'drawing' to a developed painting, I devote more attention to resolving spatial and color relationships. I believe the process is akin to a composer's arrangement of sound elements to create harmony, syncopation and resolution."Above all, my painting is about the flux of time, space, of a present that is continually renewing itself. I hope someone looking at my paintings will get the feeling that if they come back and look at it again in a few minutes, it will have changed. Of course it won't have. That is the great difference between painting and music. Regardless, I hope my paintings capture some sense of the living, mutable moment and of how as viewers or participants we navigate through that constant dynamic." [...]

News & Review

"Real Abstract", Tim White, Sacramento News & Review Art Critic, April 2003

For the past 100-plus years, modern art has been viewed by highbrow art critics as being on a progressive path of sorts, having arrived at a point beyond which painting, as an art form, had done all it could do. By the late 1980's, some artists weren't even using brushes, evidence of the hand was no longer in images, and the truly successful paintings had no illusion of space or reality. That was it; all had been done.Well, people still paint. Why? All of that nonsense only served the academic elite. Abstract painting can serve the same function as traditional painting. A group show this month titled Abstract Reality,at the Solomon Dubnick Gallery, illustrates this point. The exhibit shows that there is nothing dead about abstract art. Take the work of New York City-based Laura Hohlwein for example. Her paintings all have a strong focus on light, form and contrast - all things that artists have dealt with for ages and that are still sound areas for attention today. Hohlwein's paintings contain areas of sharply focused shapes next to fuzzy sections that create visual space; within those areas, color is lightened or darkened to evoke how light reads. Without the weight of representational objects, artists are free to explore purely formal elements. [...]So, we are all lucky that the stuffy critics have moved on to scrutinize other forms of the visual arts, such as performance or installation. And that's good; those are relatively new areas that need over-the-shoulder guidance. Abstract painting is now old enough to leave the nest and live on its own.

Sacramento Bee

"Is Modernism Really Dead?", Victoria Dalkey, Sacramento Bee, April 1999

In an era when we are supposed to have seen the death of painting and the end of modernism, it is a surprise to find [an artist] deeply engaged in the making of painterly abstractions. Laura Hohlweins stunning paintings at the Artists Contemporary Gallery were created during a 10-week residency at the prestigious Vermont Studio Center in New England. Surrounded by snow, Hohlwein says, she gravitated to light. Unlike her earlier works, which were done on glass often illuminated from within, her new paintings generate their own light. One feels in them alternatively the somber twilight of dream states and the brilliance of sun shining on snow.It appears that Hohlwein worked partially from a kind of surreal automatism, in which the artist draws on the unconscious mind during a meditative state to form images on canvas. Hohlwein gives us exuberant gestural makings in a joyful pink and white radiance in "Hallelujah Anyway," and playful forms in mists of rich, luminous color in "Present Tense." Hidden narratives and language systems, both mathematical and linguistic, inform the cool, gray glow of "Algebra" and the brimming white and yellow light of "What Appeared To Be," which bears remnants of a poetic, elliptical text. Words, too, float through the atmosphere in "The Reading Room," an interior space swirling with muscular, musical forms. Hohlweins piece de resistance is the monumental canvas "Dream of the Wetlands," in which fantastic, phosphorescent forms, inspired by memories of night fishing off Long Island, fall in a rain reminiscent of the luxurious patterning found in art-nouveau specialist Gustav Klimpts paintings. Yet there is nothing decorative about this wonderfully ambitious canvas by an artist whose work will be exhibited at this years Florence Biennale, an international art competition.

New York Times

"Painting the Moment", William Zimmer, New York Times Contributing Critic, May 1999

The paintings made by Laura Hohlwein in the 1990s reveal distinct shifts in content and philosophy from her previous work. This change indicates growing confidence, for she has risked a pleasant mode of art-making for a more difficult one. The new mode was signaled by her letting go of the figure, which had been the dominant and dramatic presence in her art.Hohlweins true and abiding subject is light, and she invokes it literally. In the past she constructed light-boxes dependent on electric light. Her new works rely on the effects of natural light. She now paints often on Lexan, the proprietary name for a very sturdy plexiglas. Because these compositions are painted on the back of sheets of Lexan, they appear to the viewer in reverse, but more importantly, her glassy and highly reflective matrixes mean that her imagery appears to float or be suspended, rather than firmly fixed. She often makes double-layered paintings, where the force of her new way of working is enhanced by pairing a composition on Lexan, serving as the front layer, with an under layer visible at the back of a thick frame. Similarly, in her large abstractions on canvas, one peers through layers of paint into a space that seems to be in flux and thereby suggests a larger space moving outside the confines of the canvas. Hohlweins renunciation of figuration is all the more compelling at this juncture in the contemporary art world. Too little attention is paid to Abstraction, which is often regarded as a period style rather a major achievement of the 20th century: a new and wider way of seeing. Many younger artists and much of the cultured public tend to disregard as irrelevant the achievements New York School, and the belief that an artist could record his or her immediate feelings spontaneously on canvas finds few adherents today (and it must be Hohlweins most recent paintings are more traditional oil on canvas, but they would lack the authority they have if she had not explored light in the literal manner she did previously. The light in these paintings is a strong inner light, opaque, yet effulgent enough to illuminate the clusters of shapes that swim and cascade over them. These shapes are firm, concerted and confident.The work remains elusive and mysterious. Clear mystery, residing in a straightforward presentation, is the most potent sort. Yet the diaphanous ground means that the shapes, for all their clarity, cannot be grasped. Again, the abstraction is like language. The shapes might be inflections that rise and fall; they communicate, yet like spoken words, are different each time they are considered. Perhaps the grandest of the new paintings is "Reading Room". The title both instructs viewers that the subject is language, but here "room" not only means secure confines, but an expanse of space [ ... ] in which consciousness is made physical in paint.HHohlweins earlier art should not be slighted. It has a received grandeur and nobility, due to its subject matter. Some of the works depicted classical statuary; others feature the quite opposite imagery of Louis Hine who photographed Americas underclass. Some of the light boxes recalled stained glass, and a viewer might be reminded of the art in Americas Gilded Age. But now, instead of reproducing sublime subjects, Laura Hohlwein, with her own communicable pre-occupations and meditations, has become her own sublime subject. The possibiities ahead of her are infinite.

Artweek
The Journal
News & Review
Sacramento Bee
New York Times

EXHIBITIONS

Exhibitions

solo showsSolomon Dubnick, Sacramento, California 2012 (upcoming)Solomon Dubnick, Sacramento, California 2009 Outdoor Installation, Chios, Greece 2008Red Mill Gallery, Johnson, Vermont 2006Solomon Dubnick, Sacramento, California 2005 Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts, New York, New York (one night video/sound installation - April 1, 2005)Phoenix Gallery, New York, New York 2004 Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts, New York, New York 2003Artists Contemporary Gallery, Sacramento, California 1999Stoeffel, Sacramento, California 1998Sacramento Poetry Center - performance of New Works Video and Illuminated Painting Grant Project 1998 Artists Contemporary Gallery, Sacramento, California 1997Galleria dell Escuola , Montecastello di Vibio, Italy 1997Artist's Contemporary Gallery, Sacramento, California 1994Artists Contemporary Gallery, Sacramento, California 1992Artists Contemporary Gallery, Sacramento, California 1991selected group showsSolomon Dubnick, Sacramento, California 2008 Solomon Dubnick, Sacramento, California 2007 Red Mill Gallery, Johnson, Vermont 2006Phoenix Gallery, New York , New York 2004Phoenix Gallery, New York, New York 2004"Interpretations of Sound and Music" Morgan County Arts Council, Berkeley Springs, WV 2003"The Rennaisance Group: Artists Who Write" - Watchung Arts Center, Watchung, NJ 2003"Abstract Realities", Solomon Dubnick, Sacramento, CA 2003International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Florence, Italy 1999Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts-Florence/USA -, New York, New York 1999Red Mill Gallery, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT1999Galleria ISA, Montecastello di Vibio, Italy 1996Dietrich Contemporary Arts, New York, New York 1996Dietrich Contemporary Arts, New York, New York 1993In Lakesh Invitational, Sacramento, California 1991
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C.V.

EDUCATIONM.F.A in New Media from Transart Institute, Austria 2007M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Vermont College 1989B.A. from California State University, Sacramento 1986Additional studies at:New York University; San Francisco State University Multimedia Program; United Digital Artists, New York; The International School of Art, Umbria, Italy; McGill University, Montreal; Oberlin College, Ohio; Centre D Etudes Françaises, Avignon, France; Parsons School of Design, TEACHINGThe Art Institute of California - Sacramento, Full-time InstructorAmerican River College- SacramentoSacramento City College - SacramentoPreviously taught at:The Art Institute Online, Pittsburgh, PA; Gibbs College, Montclair, NJ;The University of California, Davisand, in the Arts-in-Corrections Program at Duell Vocational Institution, The Northern California Women's Facility, O.H. Close School for Boys, Susanville Correctional Facility and Folsom PrisonOTHER EMPLPOYMENTCreative Director/ Documentarian, The Readers of HomerMultimedia Artist, Soliloquy, NY, NYVideo Scriptwriter / Director, General Training Company, CAFreelance Web Designer and Graphic DesignerGRANTS, RESIDENCIES & AWARDSBanff Artist-in-Residence, Banff Centre for the Arts 2011Six month working residency, Vermont Studio Center 2006Who's Who of American Women 2002Three month fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center 1999"New Works" Painting /Video Grant from the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission 1998Two Teaching Grants: California Arts Commission, '93, '96"Northern California: Introductions" Winner 1991Nominated for the Pushcart Poetry Prize 1989REPRESENTED BYSolomon Dubnick, Sacramento, CaliforniaRenee Fathoui Fine Arts, New York, New YorkJackie Kling, Montclair, New JerseyThe Artist's Resource, Silver Springs, MarylandPUBLICATIONS & READINGSSeventeen publication credits; numerous public readings 1988 - 2008Featured Reader at the San Francisco Bay Area Book Fair 1994Interviewed by August Coppolla on a PBS T.V. Special : "Committing Life Through Art" 1992Two chapbooks: "Reciprocal Questionaire" and "The Company of Space"

STATEMENTS

REVIEWS

EXHIBITIONS

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