We've been enjoying all these compact, intimate presentations that La Brea Artist Residency has been putting together at The Cabin in LA, so we couldn't pass on sharing their most recent show by the Atlanta-based artist Alic Brock. Invited by the residency founder Danny First to spend January enjoying the California winter while making new work, the artist used this opportunity to create a strong new body of work that is currently exhibited at this unique venue.
Mixing acrylic paint and airbrush Brock is applying a sort of "chopped and screwed" technique in order to create impactful, figure-based collages. Through his process, the artist removes uninteresting elements of the original image, focusing on more engaging details and often overemphasizing those. This rough approach to collaging is often purposely accentuating the Photoshop aesthetics which is then juxtaposed with painted sections in order to leave the human mark and step away from the digital appearance of his imagery.
The works in the show are built from existing, iconic images from the popular and traditional culture, and are including images of Mohammed Ali, Sharon Stone, Dennis Rodman, Dominique Wilkins, etc. Regularly contrasting the blur of the airbrush against the sharpness of the masked out edges, the images have a strong sense of dynamics, movement, and flow. With the frequent use of bright, vibrant colors, the images at times appear to be having a stroboscope effect to them, adding to their overall impact. Alongside this, Brock is often depicting his subjects bigger than life, cramping them inside the canvas format and further highlighting their importance and/or strength, an effect which gets especially intensified when seeing these pieces in such compact space as The Cabin. —Sasha Bogojev
