John Houck: Perfect Temperature Lava

John Houck is an American multi-disciplinary artist whose work is held in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Museum, New York, amongst other institutions. He is a graduate of the Whitney ISP, Skowhegan, and UCLA’s MFA program. Central to Houck’s practice is how shadows serve as signatures of both the condition and the limits of our experience. From subtly folded and rephotographed monochromatic papers, to paintings of psychological landscapes overlaid by personal objects, Houck recasts the shadow as a hinge of illusion and illumination, as the point at which what is real overlaps with what we can know and what we can imagine.

Chris Wiley is an artist, writer, and curator based in Woodstock, New York. His writing has appeared in numerous catalogs and publications including Elle, Cabinet, Kaleidoscope, and Frieze, where he is a contributing editor. He writes regularly for The New Yorker’s “Photo Booth.” His artwork has been exhibited in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Atlanta Contemporary, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser and Wirth and others. He is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York. As a curator he has worked on numerous shows at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and served as an assistant curator and catalog writer on the 8th Gwangju Biennale, and the 55th Venice Biennale. He has curated shows at MOCA Toronto, Marianne Boesky Gallery, and others.