FUCK FOREVER: NEW WORK BY ERIN ALLEN
October 17th, 2008 - November 21, 2008
MANIAC presents program 4, Fuck Forever, an exhibition debuting new work from San Francisco-based artist Erin Allen. Producing his first solo show, Allen independently transforms MANIAC into a territory of miscellany, in lieu of a stagnant exhibition, closely consulting with the basis of Allen's bizarre world of 'Very Dark Sunday' (Shitty Legacies), a blackened world where icons and insignias of the past thirty years within the American psyche become visual subjects of reexamination and emblematical matter.
While working across the traditions of painting, drawing and mixed-media installation, Allen's content is inherently informed by a specific lineage of music, pop-idolatry, and fallen-luminaries, a linage that seeks thrashed media personas as icons while incorporating elements of the generic and the debased to temper the universality of cultural misnomers relating to well-known social symbols. Allen's vision is noticed most heartedly in the spontaneity and energetic flesh-out that his work carries. Revealing a crowded intellect that anticipates the worst has already come and gone, treating logic as lucky regard, and inciting a cynicism that is far from conclusive, Allen's sensibility creates a dimension where nothing and everything is recognizable at once.
Still, there is something both nostalgic and post-human like in Allen's work aside from working with faceless pop-icons of the past 30 years. In a small pencil drawing, Cyndi Lauper suddenly doesn't seem fun at all, even with "all through the night" written above her blaring fringe cut. A close-up of the back of Bevis' (of Bevis and Butthead) mullet is energy-less in Untitled (after "Butt is it Art") and Best View of Manilow carries such a starkness that it lacks any hint of personification.
Allen's treatment of near-past cultural figures and stardoms is really just the beginning of his determining where else in the universe certainty or authenticity could exist, which readily imparts a dysfunction unique to the trophy-bearing case of idols, subjects, and proto-types on the Western cultural landscape awaiting renewal.
Seen in Fuck Forever is a full display of Allen's new work including text, posters, painting, sculpture, drawing and installation. Erin Allen holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco and a BA from California State University San Bernardino. Allen's recent exhibitions include Green Naftali Gallery, New York (in collaboration with Kai Althoff), ACME Gallery (Los Angeles), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), The Tricycle (San Francisco), and Blankspace (Oakland).
MANIAC presents program 4, Fuck Forever, an exhibition debuting new work from San Francisco-based artist Erin Allen. Producing his first solo show, Allen independently transforms MANIAC into a territory of miscellany, in lieu of a stagnant exhibition, closely consulting with the basis of Allen's bizarre world of 'Very Dark Sunday' (Shitty Legacies), a blackened world where icons and insignias of the past thirty years within the American psyche become visual subjects of reexamination and emblematical matter.
While working across the traditions of painting, drawing and mixed-media installation, Allen's content is inherently informed by a specific lineage of music, pop-idolatry, and fallen-luminaries, a linage that seeks thrashed media personas as icons while incorporating elements of the generic and the debased to temper the universality of cultural misnomers relating to well-known social symbols. Allen's vision is noticed most heartedly in the spontaneity and energetic flesh-out that his work carries. Revealing a crowded intellect that anticipates the worst has already come and gone, treating logic as lucky regard, and inciting a cynicism that is far from conclusive, Allen's sensibility creates a dimension where nothing and everything is recognizable at once.
Still, there is something both nostalgic and post-human like in Allen's work aside from working with faceless pop-icons of the past 30 years. In a small pencil drawing, Cyndi Lauper suddenly doesn't seem fun at all, even with "all through the night" written above her blaring fringe cut. A close-up of the back of Bevis' (of Bevis and Butthead) mullet is energy-less in Untitled (after "Butt is it Art") and Best View of Manilow carries such a starkness that it lacks any hint of personification.
Allen's treatment of near-past cultural figures and stardoms is really just the beginning of his determining where else in the universe certainty or authenticity could exist, which readily imparts a dysfunction unique to the trophy-bearing case of idols, subjects, and proto-types on the Western cultural landscape awaiting renewal.
Seen in Fuck Forever is a full display of Allen's new work including text, posters, painting, sculpture, drawing and installation. Erin Allen holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco and a BA from California State University San Bernardino. Allen's recent exhibitions include Green Naftali Gallery, New York (in collaboration with Kai Althoff), ACME Gallery (Los Angeles), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), The Tricycle (San Francisco), and Blankspace (Oakland).
