ROSSON CROW, ANDREW GUENTHER AND LoVid / “Familiar Haunts”

Happy Lion is pleased to present Familiar Haunts, a group exhibition featuring the work of Rosson Crow, Andrew Guenther and LoVid, and guest curated by Kathy Grayson. Though executed in various media, these three artists share a desire to examine a familiar object or place and charge it with a sense of the uncanny.

Rosson Crow is a young artist who takes a digitally-inspired and synthetic approach to history painting. Her layered compositions of carefully juxtaposed historical figures, interiors, and fashions collapse time to reveal the haunted nature of interior space. Transatlantic caucuses of men centuries and continents apart, accords, battles, vintage patterns applied with techniques even older- these theatrical confabulations are infused with shadows of lost motives, fading holograms of furniture and people, anonymous flags from forgotten battles. Approached with a video-gamed dissection of space into planes, gradients, and fills, these subjects hover between a painterly and a neo-digital aesthetic, caught also in the history of technique.

Andrew Guenther synthesizes an entirely different array of concerns and references, bringing death metal, throbbing zombie carcasses, animals, satyrs, hippie kitsch, goats, owls, slime, goo, puss, carrion, and teenagers gone awry together in an art historical exploration of the grotesque body. The references Andrew evokes, like to the Golgothic carnage of Goya's black paintings or Disasters of War etchings, are fleshed out into decay, updated with a washy looseness of application and a palette of exuberant pastoral bliss. The hot sultriness of the built up translucence, and the Peter Doig-ish uncanniness and economy of paint suggest figures half present, birthed by accident, semi-formed and twitching.

Lovid, composed of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, take another familiar and reveal its astral and spooky nature, here scrambling ordinary TV output or standard current into hyperkinetic audiovisual abstraction. Using homemade electronic devices, low-resolution video loops, and DIY instrument sculptures, the duo make huge messes with new media in both their sculptures and live performances. In this exhibition, they display sculptures and instruments, their hanging suits suggesting the absence of the material body, or its recent disappearance in a burst of static. Blips and twitters of electricity itself along with the creepy scrolling of non-synched video situate the show in the ebb and flow of distorted reality.