James Oliver Gallery is pleased to present Parallel Recollections, a two-person exhibition featuring artists Stevie Chris and Steven Mogck. The show was on view from April 6th through May 4th, 2024.
As we stretch into the lighter days of spring, Parallel Recollections offers a refreshing taste of saccharin souvenirs from memories past.
Hyper-rendered and bouncing from their matrix, these iconographic trinkets are displayed across several life-size vignettes, engaging the viewer in their illusory scale and atmospheric allure – eliciting the viewer’s dreamlike involvement – a sort of delightful déjà vu.
Photos courtesy of Ryan Hicks/Visual Grammar Photo
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Stevie Chris
Zelda Gold, Basement Legends
310gsm Archival Smooth Cotton
Pigment Ink
44”x44”
Edition of 5, 2024
Through his selected images, Stevie Chris lays a foundation of captivating wonder upon these “Parallel Recollections”. A commercial advertising/editorial photographer by trade, Chris has focused his recent personal practice on magnifying - or dignifying - the common memento and its role in our current, popular vernacular (vintage candy, garbage, toys).
Chris employs a unique process of image construction, having developed a signature mode of focus stacking that involves tedious patching and blending of an exceptional 50+ frames per subject. In this, the artist is ultimately merging similarly produced depth of field within each capture – in the pursuit of sculpting an image with greater dimension than possible with a basic snapshot. With fantastical results, Chris lends to Mogck’s similarly fabricated marvels.
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Stevie Chris Left: What do you Mean Naked? Right: Dork Vader
Parallel to Chris, Steven Mogck animates these shared recollections with nostalgic whimsy and composes with intent execution. Professionally, Mogck’s illustrations have been featured in numerous publications and storyboarding exemplified in pictures such as “Empire”, each of which in some way demonstrate Mogck’s crafted commentary on pop culture consumption. JOG is thrilled to work with Mogck on yet another project, as he has exhibited several times in our space, dating back to our conception in 2008.
Steven Mogck, Pez Captain America, Acrylic on canvas, 30” x 48” Polaroid, Acrylic on canvas, 36” x 36”
Projecting Mogck’s own recollection, the selected body of work venerates a history of gaming culture, keystone moments in popular music, and novelty objects. In conversation with Chris’ work, much of Mogck’s mode of painting and image construction entails a hyperfocus on the pictoral reproduction of the subject, often in expansive scale – an ultimately sublime encounter.
A pleasant ping-pong of amusement, the pictures of Parallel Recollections present a lighthearted recess of reminiscence. Parallel Recollections is on view through Saturday, May 4th.
Photos courtesy of Ryan Hicks/Visual Grammar Photo
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