Night Gallery x ArtMeta

HeartBeat Bot (Marine Green), 2020 encapsulates Wanda Koop’s fascination with robotics and the post-human condition. The artist’s palette—fluid strokes of red; a vibrating field of blue—breathes life into a near-human robot. Just as robots are created to fulfill a specific purpose, HeartBeat Bot (Marine Green) has a distinct psychological capacity, wherein we are able to see glimpses of ourselves within Koop’s humanoid figure. Through a deft deployment of color and mark making, the artist conjures myriad forces of energy, fusing representation and abstraction, seen and unseen, and emotional and artificial intelligences.

Wanda Koop has been painting for four decades, and was showcased in a major survey of her work mounted by the National Gallery of Canada in 2011. She has exhibited across Canada and the U.S. as well as in Europe, Asia, and South America. In 2019, The Dallas Museum of Art presented “Concentrations 61: Dreamline,” Koop’s first major solo museum exhibition in the United States. Koop has been the recipient of numerous awards, honorary doctorates, and Canadian medals of honor, including the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Order of Canada, in 2006. Her life and work have been the subject of several documentary films. She lives and works in Winnipeg, Canada.

Josh Callaghan is known for works that make subtle interventions upon familiar objects, giving new life and dimensions of meaning to quotidian items while drawing out their latent cultural associations. In his Flagpole Person, 2020 Callaghan metaphorically dismantles the nation-state and uses its foundational remnants as the raw material for a speculative, post-national personhood. The artist has cut and reconstructed institutional aluminum flagpoles into a delicate figure, who appears to have become animate and is walking the land. Caught midstep, this Person seems to have been released from its fate to uphold a tyrannical symbol of subjugation and state allegiance. One hopes the figure is moving toward a bright new future, liberated from the barbarity inflicted by “great leaders” under waving flags.

Josh Callaghan (b. 1969, Doylestown, Pennsylvania) holds an MFA in New Genres from the University of California, Los Angeles and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of North Carolina Asheville. In addition to solo exhibitions at Night Gallery in 2017 and 2020, he has had solo exhibitions at Harmony Murphy Gallery, Los Angeles; Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles; Haas & Fischer Gallery, Zurich; and Bank Gallery, Los Angeles. In the fall of 2021, Callaghan’s interactive public artwork “Social Block” was on view at Flatiron Plaza in New York City, presented as part of Armory Off-Site.His work has been written about in Art & Object, Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Interview Magazine, LA Weekly, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Previous academic appointments include Senior Lecturer in the Fine Arts Department at Otis College of Art and Design. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Throughout her practice, Mira Dancy continuously pushes the limits of how the feminine body and psychic experience can be represented. Tiger Cuffed Tiger, 2021 distills the spirit of reimagination that characterizes Dancy’s work: figures emerge and retreat, shifting in shape and color, yet retain their feminine essences. The figures borne of Dancy’s dynamic linework suggest the energetic potency of a self-realized subject as she radiates her innate power into the outside world.

Mira Dancy (b. 1979) has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Chapter NY, New York; Galería Agustina Ferreyra, Mexico City, Mexico; Galerie Hussenot, Paris, FR; Lumber Room, Portland, OR; and JOAN, Los Angeles. Her work is included in the permanent collections of LACMA, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum, New York; the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; and the YUZ Foundation, Shanghai. In 2015 she was included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1. She has been covered in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, Vogue, Kaleidoscope, and ArtNews, among other publications. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Christine Wang reconceptualizes memes found on the Internet in virtuosic detail, speaking to the ephemeral nature of online content. While humorous, her works enshrine a history that may otherwise be lost to the unrelenting inertia of Internet culture. Masterfully painted in the Impressionist style, one can compare the nineteenth century French movement’s reverence for the ephemeral with Wang’s work, which captures and preserves cultural artifacts meant to be discarded the moment new content gains traction. In Bitcoin Wife II, 2019, Wang distills the simultaneous transience and endurance of viral culture by presenting an image that occupies a distinct place in the collective consciousness—fleeting shelf-life notwithstanding.

Christine Wang (b. 1985, Washington, D.C.) has recently had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne, Berlin, and Munich; and Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, CA. Recent group exhibitions include the Frans-Haals Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands; Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; M. LeBlanc Gallery, Chicago; Et Al, San Francisco; LAXART, Los Angeles; Foxy Production, New York; and the African American Museum, Philadephia, PA, among others. In 2020, Wang’s solo presentation at The Armory Show was awarded the Pommery Prize; in 2019, she was a finalist for SFMoMA’s SECA Art Award, and in 2017, she was nominated for the Paulo Cunha E Silva Art Prize. She lives and works in San Francisco. when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.

Across her practice, Samara Golden utilizes physicality to create allegorical representations of the conscious and subconscious. Stripped of its superficial humanistic features—skin, hair, eyes, nose, mouth—the figure in Saw Dancer, 2021 traverses the built environment with arduousness and shakiness, yet never loses its footing. Its stumbling grace invokes the inherent precarity of being alive, embodying the complex skein of the psychological space.

Samara Golden (b. 1973, Ann Arbor, Michigan) has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and CANADA, New York. Her monumental installation “The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes” was featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She has also been included in group exhibitions at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Nicelle Beauchene, New York; the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; and was featured in the 2014 Hammer Biennial, Los Angeles and “Room to Live” at MOCA Los Angeles. In 2015 a monograph on Golden was published by MoMA PS1, and her work has been written about in ArtForum, Art in America, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Mousse Magazine, among other publications. Golden’s work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; LACMA and MOCA in Los Angeles; the Zabludowicz Collection, London; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. She lives and works in Los Angeles.