New Paintings by Laurie Hogin On View Beginning 10/9 at Littlejohn Contemporary

Littlejohn Contemporary will present Amygdala, an exhibition of new paintings by Laurie Hogin. The exhibition will run from October 9 - November 8, with an Opening Reception for the artist on Thursday, October 9, from 6- 8pm.

The title of the exhibition refers to an almond-shaped mass located deep within the mammalian brain, although other species, including certain reptiles, appear to have structures with similar function.(1) It is involved in motivation, emotion, and emotional behavior, and is activated by all sensory experiences.(2) It is widely accepted that the amygdala plays a critical role in acquisition and consolidation of emotionally charged memories. Research suggests that emotional memories are formed, in part, through associative learning, (3) wherein a creature's or person's emotions and behaviors are influenced by sensory experiences that cause associations with earlier experiences, even if the current environment is different.

Hogin is interested in how emotionally charged memories become language, symbols and metaphors, and how sensory inputs like color, sound, scent, physical pain, pleasure, or social and emotional context develop latent meanings through naming, categorization, and narrative.

Hogin's topics include love, pleasure, desire, attraction, and attachment, as well as trauma, anger, obsession, addiction, violence, and grief. These aspects of human experience and identity, resultant of the interplay of evolutionary biology and language, all find expression in the schizoid array of material culture, which expresses human cognition, experience, and consciousness.

The paintings combine visual, conceptual and material strategies from the history of representational painting with tropes of contemporary visual culture including cinema, advertising, fashion, pornography, food photography, retail and museum display and other narrative, representational strategies. These strategies evoke stories, memories and associations in order to convey states of being and behaviors common to humans, and arguably observable in other beings as well. Such states represent the inseparability of the emotional, physical, cognitive and psychosocial aspects of lived experience.

The works in this show use traditions in Western painting and other narrative pictorial traditions, as these traditions include established visual languages that express specific modes of thinking and ways of being. They describe emotional responses to the environment, both as sensory experience and as mediated by cultural representations and ideas about nature, especially in the history of pictures, but including poetry, literature, philosophy, politics and science.

Laurie Hogin received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where she also studied cultural anthropology. Her work is exhibited regularly across the country and is in numerous private and public collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, the Illinois State Museum, The United States Federal Reserve, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Brauer Museum, Valparaiso, IN, the Racine Art Museum, WI, among many others. She is currently Professor with Tenure and Chair of the Painting and Sculpture Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.