MICHAEL SCOGGINS

Exhibition Details:

On View: September 1 - October 28, 2023

Laney Contemporary is pleased to present Goose, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with New York-based artist Michael Scoggins whose signature style adopts the youthful alter-ego Michael S. as an autograph for large-scale drawings in the form of a monumental, hand-written notebook page. A note can be both casual and layered with heartbreak and humor. Its disarming ephemerality packs an unexpected punch with shifts in scale that can transform the insignificant into the unforgettable. In a casual note, a clipped phrase or a torn page may carry heavy weight as Scoggins uses the graphite of the pencil to point us toward complex and often shared experiences including the inseparability between joy and grief. 

A hand-written note may be scribbled on a piece of scrap paper or carefully composed, but in Scoggins’ work every line, hole, tear, and image is carefully composed with each word or image drawn on the surface loaded with visual and meaningful intention. The works in Goose remind us of the powerful presence and importance of every day. A note is a single slice of thought transferred from one person to another or from one person to the world. Scoggins’ rearticulated large-scale version of the note reminds us that paper is personal. Intimate. Universal. 

With a multilayered studio process, “drawings or paintings, sometimes become sculptures,” as Scoggins refers to them interchangeably. Each hole is carefully carved; each line is hand drawn using colored pencil and eraser, going over and over the lines, hand-producing the mass-produced paper. The cuts, folds, tears, bends, and smudges all become a part of the image as each is mounted on the wall, creating three-dimensionality through shadows and the play of light. The gallery’s mirror space culminates with a large-scale installation transforming the 2D into the 3D as paper airplanes fly in multiplication suspended from the ceiling. They merge drawing and sculpture in the act of delivering their messages from person to person, emotion and joy embodied, dispatched, and shared in ways that we might not expect.

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