Window Dressing XIX: Madeline Irvine, John Mulvany, Vy Ngo
Image: Madeline Irvine, Vy Ngo, John Mulvaney, Detail Collage of art work in Window Dressing XIX -- Natural Selection
Exhibition Dates: May 16 - 23, 2022
Natural Selection introduces three new members to the ICOSA Collective through the Window Dressing series -- visible through the gallery’s window 24 hours a day. In Natural Selection, works by Madeline Irvine, John Mulvany and Vy Ngo reflect facets of the changing natural world of the 21st century, inviting reflections on how humans relate and interact with nature today.
Irvine’s Fossil Kelp is part of a series of installations that are an elegy to the giant kelp forests off the coast of central California. These giant forests – up to 175 feet high – were done in by a population explosion of four inch purple sea urchins – an unintended consequence of global warming.
Mulvany’s recent work is a reflection of how the meaning of landscape, as it relates to painting, has morphed from an archaic subject for artists into something more vital and alive in the 21st century. In the past year, Mulvany ‘s art has focused on inexplicable light formations in the Southwest deserts of Texas and New Mexico. He considers these paintings primarily as metaphors for what feels like our slow-slow-quick-quick-slow advancing climactic apocalypse -- the signs are before our eyes, but we choose to ignore their meaning.
Ngo's newest work challenges notions of how painting can be engaged beyond the two-dimensional plane through multi-layered acrylic panels, while addressing how we view the migration of immigrants and refugees across the unforgiving and undeniably beautiful landscape of the U.S. border.
