HONG KONG.- Over the Influence is presenting Drawing Room, a group exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Katie Stout, DabsMyla, Andy Dixon, and Monica Kim Garza, on view August 17 – September 15, 2018. Each artist has created works that reflect an individual idea of the “drawing room,” offering a unique vision of traditional private spaces within a residence. Whether to write, read, or entertain visitors, drawing rooms bridged the personal and communal parts of a house.
Representations of domestic spaces became sought after with the rise of middle class patrons and a burgeoning art market early in the 19th century, with photography superseding paintings in the modern era. Markers of wealth, these interior depictions reflected the lifestyles, habits, and values of their residents. The intricate images were snapshots of life stories told through commodities.
The majority of the works in Drawing Room have been commissioned especially for this exhibition and it is the first time Katie Stout, Andy Dixon, and Monica Kim Garza, have presented in Hong Kong. In a sculptural installation, designer Katie Stout transports an archetypal living room to the gallery in her subversive singular style. Monica Kim Garza builds upon her oeuvre of highly contemporary, post-Impressionist female portraiture, along with Andy Dixon’s paintings–realized in vivid color–of the auction rooms of Sotheby’s and Christie’s as posted on their Instagram profiles, and duo DabsMyla renders a midcentury modern utopian vision in bright, graphic imagery.
Katie Stout (b. 1989) is a designer based in Brooklyn, NY. She describes her work as “naïve pop,” riffing on traditional attitudes towards furnishings and “suburban domestic life.” Through a body of work encompassing furniture, lighting, textiles, and objects, Stout continually seeks to subvert the utility of her designs, imbuing them with a strong sense of irony or sardonicism while bestowing an air of innocence. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and won the first season of HGTV’s series “Ellen’s Design Challenge” in 2015. Numerous collaborationsinclude: her fantastical “Bedroom Curio” exhibition at Design Miami 2015, which was photographed by Juergen Teller for a Barney’s Rick Owens campaign, a furniture partnership with Bjarne Melgaard for his installation at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and working with Jeremy Scott on his F/W 2018 collection. Her work has been displayed in the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
DabsMylaare Australian artists who live and work in Los Angeles, CA. The duo craft highly stylized illustrations that are bright, flat, and whimsical on both large (outdoor murals and public art) and smaller (paintings, prints) scales. With a nod to Pop Art, their work has a nostalgic essence, with retro typography and Day-Glo color. Pieces include murals and public installations in Melbourne, Australia, Santa Monica, CA, Los Angeles, CA, Detroit, MI, and Berlin, Germany, commissions from Viacom and Modernica, and exhibitions at MOCA Geffen Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA, Jonathan Levine Gallery, New York, NY, White Walls Gallery, San Francisco, CA, and the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Andy Dixon (b. 1979) is a Canadian artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. His large-scale acrylic paintings are filled with motifs that signify wealth and communicate the intimate relationship that exists between art and money. Reminiscent of Renaissance still lifes with a wholly contemporary palette and personality, Dixon’s pieces wrestle with valuation–their own and what they represent–or “what is the value of a painting of a valuable object?" His solo exhibitions include: ‘Expensive Things II’, Winsor Gallery, Art Toronto (2016); ‘Expensive Things I’, Winsor Gallery, Art Toronto (2016); and ‘Leisure Studies’, RHG, New York (2015). Group exhibitionsinclude: ’10 Year Anniversary’, Joshua Liner Gallery, New York (2018); ‘Art Seattle’, Windsor Gallery, Seattle (2017); and ‘Art Toronto’, Windsor gallery, Toronto (2016), and ‘O Canada!’ (2017), BEERS London.
Monica Kim Garza (b. 1988) is an American artist based in Atlanta, GA. Working from her multicultural background (Kim Garza is of Mexican and Korean descent) and self-portraits, she creates images of women with broad strokes in quotidian situations, drawing from dreams, memories, and projections that recall early modern masters in their style. Often nude, Kim Garza’s women depict a singular woman’s point of view that transcends into the realm of the universal. She has hadsolo exhibition at Groupe/ANON (New York, NY), Lily Roberts (Paris France) and New Image Art (Los Angeles).
