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Swarm Gallery is pleased to present JUNCTION: Recent works by Mills College MFA Grads MICHAEL HALL + ETHAN WORDEN Project Space \| TRISHA GROVER June 27 - July 27, 2008 Swarm Gallery is pleased to present a selection of standout artists from this year's Mills College MFA program. JUNCTION, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Michael Hall and Ethan Worden, represents the creative paths and unrevealed futures of each emerging artist, coming together in the gallery setting. Each working with disparate themes, the two artists pull together polarized ideas within their work. Michael Hall's oil paintings explore concepts of control and protection and the difficulties encountered in achieving a balance between the two. Ethan Worden plays with the associations we make with objects. He manipulates scale and configuration to jostle these connections and loosen the ties between the stories we assign to an object and the object itself. Michael Hall is an Oakland based artist. He received his BFA from California College of the Arts and was recently awarded the Headlands MFA Fellowship. Ethan Worden is also an Oakland-based artist and is a recipient of the Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship and the Herringer Family Foundation Prize. Ethan Worden Michael Hall, Search Results, Installation of sketch paintings (2008), Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches each, installation dimensions variable Michael Hall, Collision, Installation of paintings (2008), Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches each, installation dimensions variable Exhibition review: Crossroads: Two recent Mills graduates explore the dualities of modern life By DeWitt Cheng, East Bay Express, 7/9/08 Artists deal with always-complex times; if they aim for largeness, like Whitman, their work will contain multitudes of contradictions - as does the work of Michael Hall and Ethan Worden at Swarm Gallery. Building on current art thinking, these young artists aim at a personal vision, but they also exude contemporary art's inescapable atmosphere of irony and paradox. The antithetical issues of security and freedom interest Hall. The imagery for his 24 Search Results paintings derives from search-engine photos having no apparent connections beyond keywords: a lunar astronaut posing with flag, a teen playing Twister, a donkey suspended midair by the upended cart to which it is yoked, two men in a rowboat, a banister and chain leading down a curved staircase, a man wearing vinyl on his shoulders like a cape, pigeons around a coiled rope, and soldiers at attention beneath a splotch of white paint. The world is indeed a vast congeries of disconnects, but the Internet is hardly new in revealing this: the Surrealists drew on dictionary pictures, prizing the absurdities of alphabetical ordering, and television's breathless alternation between tragic, comic, and commercial (not forgetting sports and weather) has long been criticized as crazy-making. More compelling are Hall's twelve Collisions paintings, dramatically cropped views of totaled Chevies, Volvos, and Hondas in various states of crumpled roadside outrage (no people are shown). The voluptuous painting of these scenes draws the eye in a way that the looser, schematic handling of the Internet paintings does not, and the theme resonates with a driving, driven people: everyone crashes - or rusts. Worden, interested in the discrepancies between objects and their conceptualizations as word or model, wants to "loosen the ties between the stories we assign to an object and that object itself." Stanchions reproduces in miniature the familiar movie-line velvet rope; it bunches up into a tangle just short of the clifflike shelf over which it plunges. Scaffold recreates in brass and wood the gridded exoskeletons surrounding buildings under repair or construction, but his scaffoldings without buildings become a kind of theater set or X-rayed city. Palindromed Billboard is a wooden model of kissing- cousin billboards sharing their important messages (perhaps "A Toyota") only with each other - bookends without books, buttresses without cathedrals. When did everything stop making sense? PROJECT SPACE TRISHA GROVER \| "Display/Dispense" In the Project Space, Trisha Grover examines disposability in our consumer culture with room-size application of plastic called Display/Dispense. Cheap, shiny, and able to retain any form imaginable, plastic is the material that has come to define modern living. What do we ignore in order to rationalize these objects' disposability? Trisha Grover Trisha Grover

Swarm Gallery is pleased to present

JUNCTION: Recent works by Mills College MFA Grads
MICHAEL HALL + ETHAN WORDEN
Project Space | TRISHA GROVER

June 27 - July 27, 2008

Swarm Gallery is pleased to present a selection of standout artists from this year's Mills College MFA program.

JUNCTION, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Michael Hall and Ethan Worden, represents the creative paths and unrevealed futures of each emerging artist, coming together in the gallery setting. Each working with disparate themes, the two artists pull together polarized ideas within their work. Michael Hall's oil paintings explore concepts of control and protection and the difficulties encountered in achieving a balance between the two. Ethan Worden plays with the associations we make with objects. He manipulates scale and configuration to jostle these connections and loosen the ties between the stories we assign to an object and the object itself.

Michael Hall is an Oakland based artist. He received his BFA from California College of the Arts and was recently awarded the Headlands MFA Fellowship. Ethan Worden is also an Oakland-based artist and is a recipient of the Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship and the Herringer Family Foundation Prize.

Ethan Worden

Michael Hall, Search Results, Installation of sketch paintings (2008), Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches each, installation dimensions variable

Michael Hall, Collision, Installation of paintings (2008), Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches each, installation dimensions variable

Exhibition review: Crossroads: Two recent Mills graduates explore the dualities of modern life
By DeWitt Cheng, East Bay Express, 7/9/08

Artists deal with always-complex times; if they aim for largeness, like Whitman, their work will contain multitudes of contradictions - as does the work of Michael Hall and Ethan Worden at Swarm Gallery. Building on current art thinking, these young artists aim at a personal vision, but they also exude contemporary art's inescapable atmosphere of irony and paradox.

The antithetical issues of security and freedom interest Hall. The imagery for his 24 Search Results paintings derives from search-engine photos having no apparent connections beyond keywords: a lunar astronaut posing with flag, a teen playing Twister, a donkey suspended midair by the upended cart to which it is yoked, two men in a rowboat, a banister and chain leading down a curved staircase, a man wearing vinyl on his shoulders like a cape, pigeons around a coiled rope, and soldiers at attention beneath a splotch of white paint. The world is indeed a vast congeries of disconnects, but the Internet is hardly new in revealing this: the Surrealists drew on dictionary pictures, prizing the absurdities of alphabetical ordering, and television's breathless alternation between tragic, comic, and commercial (not forgetting sports and weather) has long been criticized as crazy-making. More compelling are Hall's twelve Collisions paintings, dramatically cropped views of totaled Chevies, Volvos, and Hondas in various states of crumpled roadside outrage (no people are shown). The voluptuous painting of these scenes draws the eye in a way that the looser, schematic handling of the Internet paintings does not, and the theme resonates with a driving, driven people: everyone crashes - or rusts.

Worden, interested in the discrepancies between objects and their conceptualizations as word or model, wants to "loosen the ties between the stories we assign to an object and that object itself." Stanchions reproduces in miniature the familiar movie-line velvet rope; it bunches up into a tangle just short of the clifflike shelf over which it plunges. Scaffold recreates in brass and wood the gridded exoskeletons surrounding buildings under repair or construction, but his scaffoldings without buildings become a kind of theater set or X-rayed city. Palindromed Billboard is a wooden model of kissing- cousin billboards sharing their important messages (perhaps "A Toyota") only with each other - bookends without books, buttresses without cathedrals. When did everything stop making sense?

PROJECT SPACE
TRISHA GROVER | "Display/Dispense"

In the Project Space, Trisha Grover examines disposability in our consumer culture with room-size application of plastic called Display/Dispense. Cheap, shiny, and able to retain any form imaginable, plastic is the material that has come to define modern living. What do we ignore in order to rationalize these objects' disposability?

Trisha Grover