As if becoming a parent wasn’t enough excitement, my solo show, Big House, opened on January 20th at Denk Gallery in the Downtown L.A. Arts District. The opening had great energy and featured an open bar, which kept spirits high. Vanessa was even able to make a brief appearance. In addition to Big House, Denk is also displaying a fantastic group show, Shift, of the esteemed artists Iva Gueorguieva, Karen Carson, Kim Dingle, and Elisa Johns, in the front gallery space.
Denk is a relatively new gallery, but already has an impressive roster of artists that includes the likes of Tim Hawkinson and Folkert de Jong. It even has its own parking lot, which will come as a relief to those of you inclined to stop by (please stop by!). The show is only up until February 17th, 2018. www.denkgallery.com
Click here to view works available for purchase on Artsy.
Press Release
Text by Marieke Treilhard
(Los Angeles, CA) – DENK gallery is pleased to announce Big House, a solo exhibition of new
work by Los Angeles-based artist Frank J. Stockton. Featuring 15 new paintings unorthodoxly
staged as a single installation, Big House presents a dense system of interconnected moments, digressive though intimately allied clusters. Stockton’s works tread a fine line between
abstraction and representation, combining the figurative with the deliberately gestural and formally abstract to distill personal reflections into nuanced visual metonymies. His paintings are
brought to life by the relational power of metaphoric systems, each an isolated though interdependent assertion in a set of contingent visual narratives. A series of personally inflected fictions, memories, and myths, Stockton’s works in Big House invoke the often traumatic etymologies of origin stories, whether cultural or personal.
Though shaped by self-reflexive offerings, Stockton’s vision of dystopian domesticity, where
the individual is as flawed as the collective histories to which it lays claim, shift imperceptibly in
and out of the private and the cultural realms. Big House focuses on the spaces that contain
and define personal experiences of time and memory, while also suggesting a larger conceptual infrastructure that binds the momentary and disparate to a holistic set of systemic architectures – confines and houses, after all, share similar foundations. Charged with frenetic frustration at times and at others, visceral pain, a violent vulnerability courses through the works in
representations of even the most mundane and seemingly innocuous subjects. Everyday objects like suburban houses and potted plants take on exaggerated significance as looming edifices and institutions or disproportionate metaphors.
The stories that shape us and define our attachments to reality and self are pervasive and nonlinear, subject to an ongoing process of absorption, revision and imperfect reiteration. Stockton’s installation of process-driven works strives to capture the contingency and temporal fracture of this experiential relationship to memory and story. Like myth, where the localized anecdote takes on universal symbolic significance, so too does Stockton’s evasive storytelling
hinge on the revelations of the momentary to reveal the structure of the whole. A tree is so
much more than just a tree, it’s a ghost, and it’s a fugitive.
Stockton’s works are brought to life through deconstruction and reconstitution. Drawing from
language and narrative, both integral parts of this process, he balances the formal interests of
abstraction with the representational impulse towards storytelling and revelation. Through a
series of suggestive superimpositions, traces of the recognizable world bleed in and out of
formal gestures and ambient spaces, while an emotive quality permeates the whole refusing
the distance of formal disinterest. Like an admission through touch, Stockton’s works resonate
hauntingly, tendering painting as an oblique confessional.
