Moon, Base, Earth
John Emison, Jonathan Ryan, Chandler Wigton

[IMAGES]

February 15 – March 23, 2015
Opening Sunday, February 15, 2015, 6–9pm

Tiger Strikes Asteroid LA is pleased to announce Moon, Base, Earth, an exhibition of new work by John Emison, Jonathan Ryan, and Chandler Wigton.

On a planet where the human population continues to grow at an exponential rate and human infrastructure increasingly encroaches on pre-human lands, the possibility and purpose of new exploration in physical landscapes must also shift. The artists in Moon, Base, Earth explore landscape through phantasy as a way to accesses the emancipatory potential of that freedom.

“ ‘Phantasy’ is a Greek work that literally means ‘a making visible’ and it is defined by the OED as ‘imagination, visionary notion’. The dictionary also suggests that ‘fantasy’ and ‘phantasy’, in spite of their identity in sound and in ultimate etymology, should be apprehended as separate words: the predominant sense of fantasy being ‘caprice, whim, fanciful invention’, while that of phantasy is ‘imagination, visionary notion.’ ” [1]

Writing on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Nariman Shakov describes the astronauts’ phantasies on Solaris as slipping between the conscious and unconscious, making difficult to assess that which is imagined and that which is sensed. While phantasy can make literal the phantoms of one’s personal or collective past, it can also be leveraged to realize new alternatives. Phantasy-making, as defined by Herbert Marcuse, “begins already with the game of children, and later, continued as day-dreaming, abandons its dependence on real objects.” [2]

Moon, Base, Earth includes the activities of three emerging artists who create new spaces within drawn territories for a re-examination of current conditions and contingent alternatives. Their interior exploration creates new landscapes as physical, image-based, philosophical, and psychological spaces. Each of their practices shares an affinity with the uncanny and phantasy as the artists continue living on a planet in which the smallest cracks and fissures open up into vast and expansive vistas.

[1] Nariman Shokov, The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 78.

[2] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955; reprint, London: Routledge, 1997), 140.

John Emison was born in 1987 in New Orleans, LA, and grew up in Northern California. He attended Colgate University (BA, 2009), Brandeis University, and Tyler School of Art (MFA, 2014). Emison has shown in California, New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, including the ICA Philadelphia. His work is often concerned with moving heavy things and making noticeable the non-visible. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Jonathan Ryan was born in Buffalo, NY, in 1989. He received his BFA from Louisiana State University in 2011 and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art in 2014. Ryan has shown his work throughout Philadelphia and Louisiana, including the Woodmere Museum of Art and the Acadiana Center for the Arts. His work pulls from everyday travel experience to engage with the history of landscape and image-based painting. Ryan currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Chandler Wigton was born in Durango, CO, in 1985, a small town in the American Southwest that lies at the intersection between the New Mexico desert to the south and the high San Juan Mountains to the north.  This unique landscape was a fertile ground for him to develop his artistic sensibilities, as well as a deep connection to the natural world.  He attended Fort Lewis College (BA, 2008) and Tyler School of Art (MFA, 2013).  Wigton employs drawing, collage, and painting to interpret his abstract experiences with places, books, and stories.  He currently lives and works in Durango, CO.