Opening Reception: Thursday, June 20, 7–10pm
Exhibition Dates: June 20–July 27, 2019
Day & Night Projects is pleased to present two artists with works in dialogue, Laurie Nye and Karl Erickson. Their exhibition Time for Something Else features paintings, videos, and drawings which posit a visionary science- fiction existence. The artworks depict ecstatic realms for the future, and take an outsider’s view of environments of color whorls, abstracted forms, and mutating patterns.
Nye’s “Earth Flowers” paintings view our natural flora through the eyes of imagined feminist explorers from the Andromeda Galaxy, seeking to reconcile the natural beauty and harmony of Earth’s ecology with the destructive history of the human race. Similarly, Erickson’s videos of aliens, flora, fauna, and UFO cults form a narrative of extraterrestrial life reaching out to contact other non-human intelligences.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Laurie Nye and Karl Erickson met as classmates at California Institute of the Arts in 2001, and also share a connection to the South. Nye grew up in Memphis, TN, is a graduate of the Memphis College of Art, and now lives in Los Angeles. Erickson, originally from Michigan, recently re-located to Memphis to teach Digital Art at Rhodes College.
Laurie Nye was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1972 and lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned a BFA from the Memphis College of Art in 1995 and her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002. Her work has been featured in solo and thematic exhibitions at The Pit, Five Car Garage, Lowell Ryan Projects, and 0-0 LA in Los Angeles; Blake and Vargas in Berlin; Open House in Brooklyn; The Dot Project in London; and Monya Rowe in St. Augustine, Florida. In 2018, Nye presented her solo exhibition Venu- sian Weather at The Pit, and her curatorial project The Airtight Garage at Big Pictures LA, both which received praise in lengthy reviews in the Los Angeles Times Arts and Culture section. She is a member of the collective Binder of Women, whose initiative is to take action to grow the number of works by female-identifying artists in contemporary art collections.
Karl Erickson makes videos, performances and collages centering on abstract narrative themes of transformative experiences, non-human intelligences, and environmentalism. Recent exhibitions include We Could Be Tran- scendent Apes at Field Projects Gallery in New York City, look to the future-past, at isthisit?, Betwixt & Between at Muncie Makes Lab, and at The Performing Media Festival. Recent video screenings and performances were included in the Kansas City Performing Media Festival, That One Film Festival, and at Blacklight Film and Video. He has been an artist in residence at The Arctic Circle, Plyspace, and Signal Culture. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts and his BFA from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Art at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN.