Laurie Hogin

Artist's Statement

Narratives and stories–from fiction, myth, doctrine, and propaganda, to news items, ad slogans and song lyrics–articulate human experiences. Our current cultural context is one in which free markets promise stories, experiences, images and commodities to fill every conceivable human need and desire, from the most basic to the weirdest and darkest. Recent works are a combination of personal narrative and cultural comment that describe how I am an example of a contemporary individual negotiating the world as she recognizes and copes with the impulses inherent in her own humanity.

My paintings range in size from the near-heroic to the diminutive. They take their window-like compositions from natural history dioramas and Western landscape, still life, and portraiture, combining visual strategies from the history of painting with contemporary visual conventions. Species are chosen for their allegorical associations in Western culture, but are depicted as degraded or mutant versions: they are the fluorescent colors of contemporary media landscapes. Their morphology resembles toys and cartoons as much as naturalistic specimens. The plants, animals, and objects depicted are the colors of our globalized economy, from the day-glo hues of big-box store commodities to the pixilated palettes of television and the Internet, as well as the colors of nationalist identity and political affiliation. Plant vines sprout berries that arrange themselves as psychoactive molecules and mushroom caps display emotional slogans; the landscape becomes an imagined nature's literal embodiment of contemporary expressions of human desire and need.

– LH

Artist's Bio

Laurie Hogan is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Selected Recent Exhibitions: 2010 – Laurie Hogin, Slane College of Communications and Fine Arts, Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois. 2009 – Laurie Hogin, Kendall Gallery, Kendall College of Art and Design, Grand Rapids, Michigan; The American Century, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids, Iowa; When Animals Talk, Tory Folliard Gallery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Epic Painting, Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisboro, Pennsylvania; Laugh it Off, Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, California; Tales from an Imaginary Menagerie, Palo Alto Center, Palo Alto, California; Art of the Dog, Memphis College of Art, Memphis, Tennessee. 2008 – Neuromantic Evening, Psychotropical Paradise and Monkey Brains, Littlejohn Contemporary and Schroeder Romerco Gallery, New York, New York; Painting 2008, Gallery Project, Ann Arbor, Michigan.