To lighten and brighten up the festive season of summer, Recession Art presents Color War, a show to celebrate the joy and possibility of color in art. Color War will showcase work in a variety of media, from found-art sculpture to lush painting. Seven participating artists will show work that demonstrates how rich, vivid, and vibrant color can reveal memories, dramatize conflict, heighten unnoticed beauty, and ultimately provide new insights through the use of color.
Many of the artist's adopt color as a way to articulate intense memories. . Jiyoun Lee-Lodge's prints portray an abstract landscape where each color substitutes for a piece of sensory information in the artist's past. Jana Ireijo shows us the world through rose-colored glasses, with pink-washed paintings reminding us of the hope and anxiety in a teenager's doodles. Simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, Rachel Fagiano's drawings show battles between faceless people who have exploded into mushroom clouds of neon color, a representation of memories that consume them.
Other artists use color to subvert expectations and point out the humor and contradiction in pop culture. Jeff Goodman's comic book-inspired drawings use the brash colors of mass-market imagery to play with the viewer's preconceptions. Bright red and yellow sound balloons explode with a "sigh" instead of a bang. Dave Rittinger's sculptures and prints use brightly playful objects like neon squirt guns and toy soldiers to touch on larger issues like the normalization of violence.
Finally, some artists use color to dramatize and make visible the beauty of the world around us. Anna Sörenson's abstract watercolors investigate the ability of art to capture shapes and colors, with beautiful results. In a more representational vein, Lindsey Warren's paintings of summery scenes use exaggerated colors to draw out the emotions of a sunny day or the golden hour before sunset.