Supercomposition

About

Gallery IDOLWILD cordially invites you to attend the opening of a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Gretchen Batcheller & Jess Goehring entitled 'Supercomposition.’ This contemporary exhibition explores the complexities of emotive memory and self-context through painting and digital medium. In Supercomposition, a multitude of layered images are arranged and manipulated to the point of abstraction, producing an entirely new image on the picture plane. The opening reception is to be on May 21, 2022 at 5:00 pm and will coincide with Keystone Art Space Open Studios in the Lincoln Heights district of Los Angeles. The exhibit will be on view May 21 and will conclude July 16, 2022. 

Los Angeles artist Gretchen Batcheller deftly combines airbrush, acrylic, and oil painting media to create paintings that bridge figurative realism and abstraction. Her work can be ebullient, cathartic, and aggressive, and, at other times, unsettlingly still. There is a palpable potency to her work that is deeply connected to her own personal narrative as a military dependent and the space and sensations that currently surround her. Her work reflects a deep exploration of color, pattern, and rhythm that echo throughout the compositions of her paintings. They also reveal a self-consciousness derived from multilayered examination of memory, nostalgia, and personal reflections on systems of oppression found throughout militarized regions of the Pacific.  Gretchen’s paintings have been featured in numerous regional, national, and international venues including the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art in Los Angeles, CA; Burgenland State Gallery in Eisenstadt, Austria; and the Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art in South Korea.

Jess Goehring digitally manipulates images using established beauty apps in order to morph the image into something beyond the systems’ original intent. The heresy of beauty filters on the reality of our appearances is flipped back on itself through her extreme distortions that reveal the illusionary nature of these filters. Her digitized portraits are then brought to life as “analog hologram screens,” a format that deceives the senses and recreates a holographic augmented reality (AR) experience in a real life format. The New York artist studied photography at the School of the Visual Arts in Manhattan. Currently, Goehring resides in Los Angeles, California, and her work has been exhibited at Spring Break LA Art Fair, Durden and Ray, and Commonly Contemporary.