Messages Abroad, an exhibition organized by Joe Tang
A part of the American art today combines the nuance of the public urban language and the universe of the private, reflexive individual artist. Iconography from religions, politics, cultures, urbanisms, and mass media culture, taken as relics of our collective history and our collective culture, are used to recount intimate personal history.
This American art today does not serve to pontificate grandiose symbolism, images are charged instead with personal conviction. It is a sleight of hand of all that we see and not see, yet often leaving social comments in the guise of self-expression. The artist today finds his/her own voice through all that applies, scavenging information, and wikipeding something new all unto itself into existence. It is a message from within but seems written from without.
As the critic from the San Francisco Chronicle Kenneth Baker once wrote about Ocampo, “The ambiguity of Ocampo's paintings is part of their sophistication. As confrontational and vehement as they are, they point to no conclusion, nor do they even encourage us to take literally the overt references they contain...I believe that what we experience as their perverse beauty is their liberating psychic effect. They free us to acknowledge the tortuous aspect of being subject to manipulation by images."
Nick Ackerman b. 1976 St. Paul, Minnesota. Ackerman received his MFA from CCA and BA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has had solo exhibitions at the Regina Gallery in Moscow; Southern Exposure in San Francisco, Lizabeth Oliveria in Los Angeles, as well as group exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in SF; and the Deitch Projects in NY.
Manuel Ocampo, b. 1965 Quezon City, Philippines. Manuel Ocampo received a Lila Wallace Artists at Giverny Award, a National Endowment award and the Rome Prize in Visual Arts at the National Academy in Rome. Ocampo’s work has been widely exhibited and is in the collections of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna, Lisbon, Fonds National D’Art Contemporain, Paris and the Fukuoka Museum, Japan.
Chris Oliveria, live and work in Los Angeles. He collaborated with Manuel Ocampo on two of the work featured in the exhibition. Oliveria received his MFA at CCA and his BFA from the SFAI. He has had solo exhibitions at the Galleria Almirante in Madrid; Galleria Wunderk in Valencia, Spain, The San Jose Museum of Art, and Lizabeth Oliveria in San Francisco.
Michael Scoggins , b. 1973 Washington, D.C. received his MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. He exhibited at Freight & Volume in New York, Priska Juschka Fine Art in Brooklyn, and currently at Diana Lowenstein Gallery in Miami.