Nicole Capps & James McCarthy. Knockdown Dash

About

In Knockdown Dash by Nicole Capps + James McCarthy and Broken Ground by John Hulsey + collaborators, the artists draw on their personal experiences to explore structural concerns.

Knockdown Dash is named for a type of ubiquitous pink stucco found in Southern California. The show includes Pink Elephant, a sculptural representation of a dream had by Capps in which she found herself in a bedroom entirely covered in the material. McCarthy translated aspects of the dream, writing of the process, “Sharing a dream is a revealing of the inner self.  Peeling away the edited façade of the conscious person to reveal the unedited subconscious.”  Drawing on his experience of cutting through layers of stucco as an electrician, he recreated the sub stucco layers he often encounters through soft fabric sculpture, mirroring the revealing process of the subconscious mind. Capp’s created three surreal large-scale drawings that explore the relationship between styles of stucco and neighborhood identity, which often becoming an aesthetic shorthand for socioeconomic status.  The artists used their own experiences with housing combined with sociological inquiry to create a playful yet deeply thought provoking experience. As Capps writes, “I grew up in a stucco house in the valley, and have lived in several stucco apartment buildings in Palms, Echo Park and City of Commerce. Celebration, monotony, joy and exhaustion, loss, love, play and work have happened in and outside of stucco structures.”