Katie Herzog with Andrew Choate: Exegesis Eisegesis Encaustic

Klowden Mann is proud to present Exegesis Eisegesis Encaustic, a collaborative exhibition of work by gallery artist Katie Herzog, and Los Angeles writer Andrew Choate. For Herzog’s first solo show at the gallery, she invited Choate to collaborate on a series of encaustic diptychs that depict and refract signage text in and around Los Angeles. The exhibition will be on view from June 18th through July 16th, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 18th from 6-8pm, and additional supplemental dialogue, and music programming to take place in July. A book on the exhibition will be published by Insert Blanc Press in Winter 2016.

Exegesis Eisegesis Encaustic embodies a playful engagement with material and structural aspects of language, serving as a meeting point of production for two unique visual and textual artistic practices. Herzog and Choate choose signs they find across Los Angeles that are not iconic but are representative: both generic and evocative. Once the signs are chosen, Herzog and Choate then mirror and refract them in order to create partner signs with new language. Choate re­writes the existing signs using a variety of methods of refraction for each one depending on the physical and syntactical qualities of the words in combination.. Herzog then forms the compositions and creates the paintings using encaustic. “L Lu Sub: Coffee, Sandwich, Drinking Water” turns into "Elusive G: Ultimate Coffer, Go To The Well”, “Ethical Drugs” into “Mistaken Hugs” and “Family Dentistry” into “Thoroughbred Narcisstry”.

Encaustic painting, one of the world’s oldest art forms, is the technique of applying molten pigmented beeswax to a surface and fusing each layer. In Ancient Greece, encaustic painting was applied to architecture, warships, and sculptures around the Acropolis, and in Ancient Egypt was used to paint portraits on mummified bodies, while in the 20th century, artists such as Jasper Johns, Lynda Benglis, and Brice Marden brought the form back into popular Western awareness. Choate and Herzog connect the internal experience of a time/place/city with the external representations and perception of that place, prompted by the charged relationship between sign and signified that occurs in every act of naming.

Individually, Choate and Herzog have both long been focused on issues surrounding language and materiality. Herzog has often organized her practice around projects using specific vantage points to look at the interplay between embodiment, language, and the power at play in different knowledge economies. Choate’s work is formed through language that acts as material and object. In speaking of Exegesis Eisegesis Encaustic, Choate says, "The idea that words are outside of things is not only an error of perception, but also an error with political valence and ethical repercussions that misshape how the world is experienced. This collaboration requires that words be put inside of things, to see what new arrangements do to us."