In a bold attempt to wrap up the past ten years inside a single art gallery, OHWOW brings the world Post 9-11. The works of nine artists come together for a very poignant, meditated retrospective of an era very recently was.

New York-based artists Dan Colen, Terence Koh, Hanna Liden, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Ryan McGinley, Agathe Snow, Dash Snow, and Aaron Young are the conduits through which many emotions and flow–through them, America’s decade-long struggles and triumphs find fitting expression. Paintings, photography, sculptures, and installations are the media curated to embody the Post 9-11 decade. More than just artists, these nine are friends and collaborators whose stylistic progressions are influenced by one another, and Post 9-11 is their response to each of their own experiences in the past 10 years.

OHWOW describes the works on Post 9-11 as “running the gamut between defiant, irreverent, destructive, sublime, utopian, and filled with emotions.” The various themes that they wish to impart come evidently in Dan Colen’s work, Blop!, 2011 – tar and feathers enmeshed on canvas to form a poignant unruliness. It is said to “reference the barbaric and archaic act of punishment and interject a strong sense of materiality with the use of unconventional media.”

Ryan McGinley’s photograph, Tom (Golden Tunnel), 2010, is another piece in the set that works a different way than Colen’s, but with the same era evoked. A nude male persona walks along the rail of a tunnel bathed in glaring light. Rather than invoking the representational chaos that Blop! did, there is an elaborate use of surrealism and existentialism in this cliffhanger art work.

Art and history have always been mutually effective in their purposes, and Post 9-11 proves that by making a statement–an elaborate recap of a decade behind us, in all its emotional complexities and nuances. Open June 30 to August 27 in L.A., the gallery welcomes all who wish to vividly recount the first tenth of the 21st century through art. -LONGFELLOW

via OHWOW

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