Megan Cotts “IDEA’L”

Junior Projects

poster for Megan Cotts “IDEA’L”
[Image: Megan Cotts "Geiststrasse" (2015) Tempera on linen, 36 x 16 in.]

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JUNIOR PROJECTS presents a solo exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based
artist Megan Cotts. This is the artist’s first solo show at the gallery. Inspired by inventions in
‘honeycomb’ technology that her second great-grandfather’s company patented in Germany in
the early 1900s, Cotts creates a new aesthetic framework to explore the uniquely manufactured
hexagonal decor that once was the basis of her family’s daily existence prior to being ejected
from Germany during the tide of National Socialist uprising. Cotts inscribes her family’s patents
into her work as well as the former factories’ architecture, social sphere, and machinery, and
connects the oral histories she’s absorbed and locations she’s visited during her research,
including what were once her family’s factory buildings in Halle (Saale), Germany and Paris,
France. In this way, her work invokes the spirit of the novels of W.G. Sebald, who weaves
historical documentation into his quasi-fictional narratives and with whom Cotts finds a kindred
inventive spirit.

In IDEA’L, Cotts debuts her ‘punch cards’. Here, torn, collaged and painted canvas covered with
numerous carefully plotted holes allude to the cards fed through hand-crank machines in the
Heilbrun & Pinner factories to yield various paper patterns. Cotts’s ‘punch cards’ are a vehicle
to explore the idea of input rather than output. Cotts morphs what were effectively common
mechanical instructional documents into seductive, hand-made repositories of idea and social
exchange. The holes and torn canvas further function to highlight the notion of physical
displacement and psychological loss. Named after specific factory locations, for example,
Geiststrasse 21-22, each work signifies a collective longing to fill and understand gaps in one’s
personal history.

In her other works, Cotts stitches her inheritance into found linen remnants to create objects
that are at once painting and sculpture. Cotts first dyes the linen in a palette inspired by the
colors of the walls and tiling of the factories and subsequently tucks and stitches it by hand into
an all-over interlocking pattern of diamonds (“the honeycombs”). In DE528136 Fig.3 (The
Unintended), cream white striations appear to hover over and weave through the threedimensionsal
dunkelfelder wine-stained folds. These works feature and are titled after the
actual patented schematic drawings as used by Heilbrun & Pinner over eighty years ago. They
offer a poignant physical mapping of her family’s diaspora while also commenting on the allure
of mechanized perfection in art making by recreating a machine-crafted aesthetic by hand.

Megan Cotts was born in New York, NY in 1979, and received her MFA from California Institute
of the Arts in 2009. She has exhibited at Klowden Mann Gallery, Los Angeles, Future Gallery,
Berlin, Germany, and Atelierhof Kreuzberg in Berlin, Germany. Cotts has also performed and
exhibited with D3 at Machine Project and Human Resources in Los Angeles, CCS Gallery at UC
Santa Barbara, and Central Trak Gallery in Dallas.

Media

Schedule

from May 09, 2015 to July 02, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-05-09 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Megan Cotts

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