Starting with Goo

For Immediate Release: January 1, 2008
Contact: Sarah Eberle/Ben Will

Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art is proud to present Starting with Goo, an exhibition featuring Adam Neuman, Jackie Hoving, Brian Zegeer and Bruce Campbell. The exhibition runs January 10th through February 23rd with an opening reception on January 10th from

6 - 9 pm. Starting with Goo examines the thinly veiled violence that is pervasive in contemporary society. Bubbling, boiling and near the point of attack, the works in this exhibition thrust the viewer into a primal world; where we are tethered to a historical umbilical chord connected with the primordial goo of our past. The drawings, collages, sculpture and digital animation in this exhibition extol a feeling of general destabilization and social fracturization in regards to the contemporary experience.

Adam Neuman's sculptural work "Volcano" spews forth a cockeyed sense of impending doom. By melting plastic army men, the colorful remnants of these figures become an exploding monument of human miscalculation. Sharing lineage with both Goya and the Chapman Brothers, Adam Neuman's work contains a playful sense of doom, created from a luscious lump of discarded matter.

Jackie Hoving's collages contain membrane like streams of color that subtly distort the initial motive for their creation. Often using animal imagery as stand-ins for the human violence implicated in her work, this recent work adds elements of the abstract to her extensive visual language. This combination adds a sense of mystery to her normally faux-monumental imagery. Hoving's process is that of a filtration system, akin to the necessary filtering of images that continually bombard us. In the context of this exhibition, Hoving's collages point to a level of incomplete decipherability resembling many experiences of the 21st century.

Brian Zegeer's digital animation, Symptoms of Kay Khalor, details a version of a suicide bombing and makes a subtle reference to violence in the Middle East. Its sumptuous contour is inspired by Arabic calligraphy and Aubrey Beardsley drawings. This opulence is aligned with a natural violence or corruption, which references the manner in which multinational industry devoted to delectation is typically supported by an exploitative economic order. These circumstances are symptomatic of a global contemporary society.

Bruce Campbell's drawings are fluttering macro-constructive sequences containing both elements of landscape and architecture, while never completely adhering to either. They are slippery, pliable masses birthed from traditional modernist abstract practices. However, they deny their modernist roots by appearing decidedly unmonumental. Campbell's drawings can be seen as the philosophical contents of the primordial soup itself. Constantly in the state of becoming, they qualify as a tenet of the contemporary experience.

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