August 4 - September 24, 2023, Wednesday - Sunday, 12:00pm - 5:00pm
108|Contemporary is excited to announce Live from the Moon, a two artist exhibition featuring the work of Linda Lopez and Mathew McConnell. This exhibition will be on view from Friday, August 4 through Sunday, September 24, 2023.
Exhibition Work Available Here
Partners in both life and profession, Linda Lopez and Mathew McConnell have worked side by side for more than a decade. In these years, the distance between their practices has remained stubbornly intact. Their working methods, conceptual premises, and aesthetic hallmarks have remained distinct, even while they rely fully upon one another as guide and confidante. Remarkably few decisions go undiscussed between them as their work is being made, and they know each other’s practices as well as any other person could.
Yet, their practices are undeniably distinct. While they share an inherent draw to ceramics as a touchstone medium, Lopez’s work stems from the inherent imprecision of language, mapped upon the domestic realm. Her objects are uncannily familiar and fantastical in tone. They are objects that squirm, shudder, and move, laying bare their internal state. Her works are the mundane made gloriously animate. McConnell’s works, conversely, withhold as much as they give. They are quiet and stable, even sullen at times. They are works that fold inward on themselves, often guarding their motivations, and inviting the viewer to sustained speculation. A mediation between external creative influences and internal creative impulses, McConnell’s work presents a distinct counterpoint to Lopez’s.
Live from the Moon pairs their practices, putting on display the disparities in their work, while asking the viewer to intuit the strong but unseen connections between the two. Lopez and McConnell are artists who continually broadcast to one another, a close witness to the other’s production, though impossibly removed from inhabiting the singularity and peculiarity of the other’s logic. There is an unknowable, abstract gulf that remains between these artists, no matter how intertwined their personal and professional lives may be. Live from the Moon aims to make this manifest.
About the Artists:
Mathew McConnell (b. 1979, Johnstown, PA) holds an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a BFA from Valdosta State University in Georgia. He has held numerous solo exhibitions and his works have been included in group exhibitions in China, Australia, New Zealand, and in many venues across the United States. His most recent solo exhibition, February February was held at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami. He has been subject of feature-length articles in Ceramics Art and Perception, Ceramics Monthly, and New Ceramics. In 2012, Mathew was granted an Emerging Artist award from the National Council on Education in Ceramic Art. He has been a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation, Anderson Ranch, and Greenwich House Pottery, and served as the Artist in Residence and Guest Lecturer of Contemporary Craft at Unitec in Auckland, New Zealand in 2010. He is currently serving as an Associate Professor at the University of Arkansas, where he oversees the ceramics area.
Linda Nguyen Lopez (b. Visalia, California) is an American artist of Vietnamese and Mexican descent. Her abstract works explore the poetic potential of the everyday by imagining and articulating a vast emotional range embedded in the mundane objects that surround us. Her works have been exhibited in Italy, New Zealand, England and throughout the United States including the Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach; The Hole Gallery, New York; Fisher Parrish Gallery, Brooklyn; and David B. Smith Gallery, Denver. She has been an artist in residence at The Clay Studio, Archie Bray Foundation, CRETA Rome, and Greenwich House Pottery. Lopez is represented by Mindy Solomon gallery in Miami, Florida.
Watch the Virtual Tour below!
Artists Talk Recording: