Troy Gua [Seattle, WA]

May 17th – July 13th, 2013
Troy Gua is an artist whose work investigates identity, celebrity and popular culture. His Pop Hybrid series is a unique, superimposition of iconic faces and imagery, instantly recognizable on their own, but dissolved into a kind of Rorschach  inkblot puzzle when merged—each viewer seeing something different, making his or her own subjective associations. The resulting hybrid image is a new and separate identity, functioning as irony and satire; as metaphor and social commentary.

 
The identities of his subjects range from musicians like David Bowie and Leonard Cohen to physicists like Albert Einstein and Robert Op p e n h e ime r—kings and queens, Hollywood royalty, tabloid tarts, poets and philosophers—even Americ an presidents make appearances.

 
Merging identity and interlayered shapes and contours, combined with a masterful sense of color, Mr. Gua’s resin-coated
compositions appear as colorful works of glass. The slick, clean presentation is meant to be reflective—and reflected  upon.

 
Tom Yody [Cleveland, OH ]
July 19th – September 14th, 2013
In the early 1970s, Tom Yody found himself shuttling between Cleveland, where he periodically taught at the Cooper  School of Art, and Victoria, British Columbia. The draw west eventually won out, and he relocated first to Victoria, then  to the American northwest coast. He became an active artist in his new community, continuing to hone his craft,  exhibiting his installations, drawings, and sculptures–but he always yearned for Cleveland.

 

Returning to Cleveland in 2011, Mr. Yody was invigorated by the thriving art scene, and inspired by the thing he missed  most about Cleveland—what he refers to as the “worka- day, blue shirt commitment and dedication of the artists here.”  He immediately set to creating a new body of work. Mr. Yody’s abstract sculptures, primarily in wood, with their smooth  curves and penetrating apertures, often seem like bones or joints. The hand of a sculptor is also evidenced in his abstract  drawings, where he seems to be sculpting in the medium of his imagination—the plane of the paper providing a depth for  the layers of imagery that reference a high modernist aesthetic, evoking the non-representational surrealism of Yves  Tanguy and the organic structures of Antonio Gaudi.