Chris Engman, Cody Trepte, Samanta Roth, John Houck

Dualities, Omissions, Loops, and Ruptures navigates between photography, film, drawing, print, and sculpture in order to explore ideas that play with paradox vis-a-visconstructed realities (a place, time, object, thought or dream, etc.) and notions of psychologicaland emotional dualities (i.e., grandeur and the ordinary, reason and absurdity, struggle and futility, illusion and disillusionment, etc.).  The exhibition juxtaposes these four artists’ interest in linguistics and narrative, appropriated and mediated imagery, time and spatial perception, content and context, and how meaning is constructed and understood against the fluid dynamics of abstraction and representation.

Chris Engman’s work takes the human condition as its central theme and examines the most fundamental of issues: the inexplicable fact of our existence, the ungraspable experience of time, and the illusive and unknowable nature of reality. His work calls attention to our misperceptions—the gulf that exists between how we see and how we think, and how we think we see and think we think—and the inconstant and constructed nature of memory. Engman’s photographs aim to speak to the passage of time closer to how it is actually experienced. Days are spent erecting structures and sets and studying the slow progress of the sun overhead and its precise movements. They are documentations of sculptures and installations as well as records of actions and elaborate processes—acts of reverence and participation in a deep, reassuring natural order outside of and much larger than himself.

Working primarily in drawing, printmaking and photography, Cody Trepte’s work looks to an alternate articulation of time, one that is both frozen and repeating. His new work comprised of silkscreen and xerographic prints and a projected 16mm film loop, literally recedes into, and emerges from, the artifacts of its own production. The 16mm projection is a 10 second loop of the artist's father standing against a decorative cinder block wall tightly cropped so that only his mid-section is visible. The subject's movements are slight and repeat ad infinitum, an attempt to capture in some way the reality of his progressive illness.  The work explores the threshold of visibility, repeating but never fully revealing itself. Lost in the noise, it inhabits a space between concealment and that which hasn't yet been completely rendered, slowly revealing new sets of questions or inquiry over time.