Night Gallery presents Samara Golden and Jesse Mockrin

Night Gallery presents Samara Golden and Jesse Mockrin

Opening: Saturday, January 18th 7pm – 10pm
Show Runs Through: January 18th – February 22nd, 2014

Samara Golden – Mass Murder

FEB 22, 2014
It’s Mass murder.
It’s the world and then the reversal of the world.
It’s trying to find the beautiful inside of a horrible world of hypocrisy and contradiction.
It’s personal.
It’s optimism and pessimism in a dead lock. It’s two stories. It’s bad blood.
It’s a caged thought.
It’s a purple light giving a performance.
It’s our living room 1975-1988.
It’s an airport convention room, it’s a bank, a hospital, a hotel.
The wall, a dance club, a parking lot
It’s a flight simulator that makes you believe you’re in the sky when you’re actually crashing into nothing miles away from real life.
It’s the disillusionment of the Vietnam generation, it’s my parents.
It’s keyboard lessons, gymnastics, those flowers my mom loves, Vivaldi the four seasons, Pink Floyd, The Ramones.
It’s a room that was both my sister’s place and my grandma’s. It’s the records, the boom box, Detroit “wheelz” radio, the two cockatiel birds, Rudy, and heavy metal. It’s the black and white TV, the alcohol, the reading, the neon knitted Afghans, the curly grey hair, the heart problems, the smoke, and the cigarettes.
It’s also the matchboxes, the taste, the piano, the white carpet, the abalone box in the ladies room, the jewelry.
It’s a highway underpass.
It’s sleeping in the street. It’s train hopping. It’s April, it’s her amputated leg.
It’s a big mess, seriously
It’s a place to think about it.
It’s the fog and the mist.
It’s asking why- it’s hoping for a peaceful place.
It’s a broken heart for the world.

Samara Golden (b. 1973 Michigan) received her MFA from Columbia University in 2009 Golden has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe including institutions such as MOCA, Los Angeles and the Sculpture Center in New York City. She is represented by Night Gallery, Los Angeles, and Canada, New York City. Her recent work has been written about in Mousse, Art in America, Flash Art, and Artforum.

Jesse Mockrin – Midnight Sun

Jesse Mockrin’s paintings combine the high, enduring power of the old masters with the low, fleeting stardom of Korean pop stars. The resulting portraits are angelic frankensteins whose elongated necks and oversized lips belong to both past and present. The black frame creates a timeless space that plays host to creatures who evoke the androgynous boys of Sargent and the dreamy aristocrats of Jane Austen. Feminized to be less threatening, the boys inside these paintings allude to the Never-Never lands of modern day fairy tales like Twilight and the naïve adulation of pop stars like Justin Bieber. Though we are aware of the profit-driven marketing machine that constructs these unattainable fantasies, we often inhabit them willfully. Our flights into illusion may be sad and escapist, but there is still something powerful about the human ability to believe in things like love, magic and the potential of painting.

Jesse Mockrin (b. Silver Spring, MD 1981) received her MFA from UCSD in 2011 and her BA from Barnard College in 2003. Mockrin has exhibited throughout the United States, most recently participating in the group show “Made in Space” at Night Gallery in Los Angeles and at Venus Over Manhattan and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York (2013). Her work has been acquired by the non-profit ArtNow International in San Francisco. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Night Gallery
2276 East 16th Street Los Angeles , CA 90021
(323) 589-1135
Tuesday-Saturday, Noon-7pm
Map It
Visit Website



PREVIOUS

NEXT