Cirrus is pleased to present Ian Hokin: Mirage and Margaret Nielsen: Love Stories/Short Stories – two solo shows that will run concurrently from September 13 – October 25, 2015. While Hokin is a young LA based artist, Margaret Nielsen has been actively showing in Southern California since the 1970s. Despite their distinctive approaches to painting, both share an interest in images and archetypes – conjured from the depths of their psyches – which put into question our own realities.
With a background in both art and psychology, Margaret Nielsen mines the collective unconscious for characters that poignantly speak of the human condition. In Lure, the image of the bird stares at its mirror reflection held by a foreboding hand. While the recurring image of the bird can be seen as the personification of our own relationship with mortality, other works similarly speak of our fragility and the impending effects of nature’s collision with culture.
Working with incongruous symbols that are derived from imagery seen during a trance-like state, Ian Hokin creates narratives that are both absurd and yet reminiscent of our everyday. Using oil as an immediate translation of the experience of the “closed eye” image, Hokin’s application of paint and use of collage amplifies the sensation of weaving between a realm of the familiar, the unfamiliar, and that of the uncanny.
Ian Hokin is originally from Wisconsin, and currently lives in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2011. He has shown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Brennan and Griffin and Harris Lieberman in NY, The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, ArtMur Gallery in Canada, and the Ulrich Museum in Kansas.
Margaret Nielsen was born in Alberta, Canada, and currently resides in Ventura, California. She received her BFA from California Institute of the Arts, and her MA in art therapy from Loyola Marymount University. She has shown extensively in United States, including the Schneider Museum of Art, the Gibbs Museum of Art, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Artists Space, NY, Rena Branstein Gallery and AsherFaure. Her work can be found in a number of collections, such as the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Madison Art Center in Wisconsin. She was also a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Beaubourg Foundation Fellowship.