NYAB Event - Sage Vaughn “Wild Flowers”

Sage Vaughn “Wild Flowers”

Judith Charles Gallery

[Image: Sage Vaughn "Vasquez" (2015) acrylic, ink, vellum on canvas 70 x 70 in.]

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Judith Charles Gallery and Blueshift Project present Wild Flowers, a solo show with the Los Angeles-based artist Sage Vaughn. This new body of work is a meditation on gardens and our incessant desire to control nature and fabricate beauty. The garden serves as metaphor for the natural beauty that strangely coexists with our inherent decline and mortality.

Vaughn’s romanticized paintings and collages are dispersed with highly stylized and repetitive iterations of flowers, butterflies, mushrooms, snails, and other creatures against an abstracted background. This growing body of controlled chaos, cycle-of-life work is deeply rooted in the artist’s aesthetic philosophy, which is both informed and inspired by Robert Irwin. For Vaughn, being an artist is a labor of merit. As an artist he believes he has the responsibility to expand our consciousness and potential, and to see how beautiful the world really is. Art empowers the viewer, instigates the process of discovery, and not merely depicts the physical manifestations of reality but draws out the underlining complexities and richness of life. As Irwin has eloquently stated:

“As artists, the one true inquiry of art as a pure subject is an inquiry of our potential to know the world around us and our actively being in it, with a particular emphasis on the aesthetic. This world is not just somehow given to us whole. We perceive, we shape the world, and as artists we discover and give value to our human potential to “see” the infinite richness (beauty?) in everything, creating an extended aesthetic reality.” (Irwin, “The Hidden Structures of Art,” in Robert Irwin, ed. R. Ferguson, New York, 1993, p. 35)

Sage Vaughn (B. 1976, Jackson, Oregon) has exhibited his work throughout the world and has participated in shows with the Thelma Sadoff Center For The Arts (Wisconsin, 2014), The Dactyl Foundation (New York, 2005 and 2007) and was included in the group show Transmission LA, Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012) curated by Mike D. His most recent publications include Ice Age, with poetry by Anthony Anzalone (Zero + Publishing, 2013) and Message, forward written by Evan Pricco (Kill Your Idols, Inc., 2013).