Lauriston Avery, Rafael Bueno, Damian Catera, Dave Choi, Michelle Forsyth, Peter Fox, Lee Ranaldo and Matt Wycoff.

On December 12, The Hogar Collection will open it’s newest exhibition, Sneak Peek, a group exhibition that will feature recent painting, sculpture, video, works on paper, sound and photography by 8 extraordinary and diverse artists who will all be presenting solo exhibitions at the gallery in the coming year of 2009. With variations on approach, styles and themes, the show will encompass the gallery’s mission to promote energetic, provocative and innovative art that challenges a broad variety of mediums and concepts. With unique and utterly contemporary voices, the artists represented deal with a wide range of ideas including rock and roll, poetry, handicraft, humor, materiality, deconstruction, abstraction, synasthesia, conceptualism, the occult, sublimity, language and its semantics. The year and it’s artists have a lot to say and show, we hope you enjoy!

Michelle Forsyth’s work documents tragic moments of history into subtle mantra-like poetic memorials that cultivate and consider the collective human condition. As a narrator of scenes, she creates beautiful and stunning works that capture the essence of specific places and presents their current landscape in an abstracted kaleidoscopic pixilation that is inspired by ancient Islamic mosaic patterning techniques.

Founding member and guitarist for Sonic Youth, Lee Ranaldo will present works that meld and blur poetry, rock and roll, media and borrow from familiar everyday things. He will be presenting a mixed media wall installation that combines written word with both sculptural and painterly elements.

Peter Fox’s work goes beyond the lush, colorful and textured eye-candy from that they seem to be at first look. His beautifully designed and crafted paintings are reduced to the baseness of the material used to create them. Using drips as his brushstrokes, his strategy talks about the architecture of language and how things are encoded.

Damian Catera’s work deconstructs everyday and familiar sound using algorithmic methods to sample, cut, manipulate, splice and combine the pieces back together creating a familiar yet foreign arrangement. His newest series takes a fresh look at the visual language of his manipulated musical scores and turns them into “classically” inspired prints that twist and distort the written composition and their notes into a warp of “sound waves”.

Dave Choi walks a thin line that teeters the edge of a philosophical hermit and an extraverted punk rocker. His work is as serious as a complex postulate or a playful meditation. He will be presenting his newest video work that considers the age-old curiosity and notion of flight and it’s contemplative mysteries.

Lauriston Avery’s dark and mysterious paintings evoke auras and mystical landscapes that delve into the realms of mythology. Culling from inspirations like death metal, the occult and our desire to know a magical and sublime sense of the unknown, his paintings push the envelope of the overly drawn out “dark” art of recent trends to insightful, provocative and truly innovative painterly vision.

Matt Wycoff’s work traverses on a path of the conceptual mastermind. With highly educated responses and references to historical works and movements he employs a certain semantic word play that is like an inquisitive exploration that pushes the possibilities and understanding of communication. He will be presenting his newest work that combines minimalist abstract color painting with precarious formalistic sculpture.

Rafael Bueno’s paintings visually represent discordant figures that exist in atmospheric and bleak vacuous landscapes. His paintings contrast between thin and washy backgrounds with faint figures that are covered and hidden in part by thick and painterly globular brushstrokes whose tactile material quality speaks in the most expressionistic terms. They are poems from a verse unsaid that are quiet yet contain a sense of undetermined urgency.