From the gallery:
"ERIN CLULEY GALLERY is pleased to announce the concurrent solo exhibitions of Dallas based KEVIN TODORA and the first exhibition with the gallery by Indianapolis based artist ROBERT HORVATH. The exhibitions will be on view February 27th through April 3rd at the gallery located in the Dallas Design District at 150 Manufacturing Street, Suite 210.
Through ceramics and his first exhibition with the gallery, A Veritable Minefield of Useless Information, ROBERT HORVATH explores the societal concept of the “meme” established in the 1970s by Richard Dawkins – an idea, behavior, style, or usage that escalates from person to person within a culture. More specifically, he is interested in how ideas operate, travel, and become warped in our digital age; often accelerating this process and contributing to further spread of misinformation. Like a game of telephone, the longer distance that a concept travels, the more distortion it may endure, evolving within and directly affecting our culture.
Horvath’s amorphic, organic forms resemble living things that have grown little by little, stacking and clustering, amassing in size and context from its original state, much like the growth patterns of crystals, fungi, or modern myths. Their indulgent colors and textures recall the seductive quality of hearsay, and the seemingly unstable forms point to the precarious situations that can arise when our thought is decidedly not based in truth. By bringing these abstract fables into the physical world, Horvath critiques this phenomenon and confronts the viewer with the aftermath it can leave behind.
KEVIN TODORA utilizes the photograph as the foundation for his sculptural work. His process consists of cutting, drilling and painting onto appropriated material in an attempt to free the image from its original obligation. By physically manipulating photographs, he distorts the original intent, making it his own. Behind the camera, Todora experiments with everyday objects, taking them out of their usual contexts and placing them into unexpected photographic tableaux. Both of these processes emanate from Todora’s desire to renegotiate the purpose of an image. Ultimately, the deconstructed works rebel against what Todora considers intrusive imagery in print media.
Kevin Todora earned his MFA in 2009 from Southern Methodist University, and his BFA in 2009 from the University of Texas at Dallas. In 2013, Todora was the subject of a solo exhibition at Dallas Contemporary. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Barry Whistler Gallery, University of Texas at Dallas and the Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, as well as the inaugural Soluna Festival amongst artists Pipilotti Riist, Alex Prager, and others. Todora has been published in an issue of New American Paintings and has been awarded the Kimbrough Grant through the Dallas Museum of Art.
ROBERT HORVATH (born Nitra, Slovakia, 1974) received a BFA from Midwestern State University (1999) and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2002). Horvath follows a philosophy unbound from any one medium, reflected in his facility with painting, digital media, sculpture, and ceramics. Guided by multidisciplinary reflections on gender and sexuality, his work has spanned explorations of youthful hedonism in the early 2000s to temporal pastiches of homo-erotica that draw on Rococo aesthetics.
Horvath's present work plays with ideas of inventedness and amorphism, an unsuspectingly natural development in his diverse corpus to date. He has exhibited his work at Packer-Schopf Gallery in Chicago; Bert Green Fine Art in Los Angeles and Chicago; Lyonsweir Gallery in NYC; and Jolie Laide in Philadelphia, among others. Horvath is an Associate Professor of Painting at the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University."
