OCHI is pleased to present Warm Up, Devin Farrand’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view in Ketchum, Idaho from December 31, 2021 through February 19, 2022. A private artist’s reception will take place on New Year’s Eve, Friday, December 31st. Contact the gallery at gallery@ochigallery.com for more details or to schedule an appointment.

Warm Up features large aluminum horizons, a suite of new paintings, and marble works depicting close-ups of down jackets. Utilitarian in nature and instantly recognizable, these coats are marketed as hi-tech, fashionable outerwear and consist of goose down and polyester layers held in place by parallel seams that create the eponymous puff. Farrand’s paintings frame details of coat construction with puff rows providing dozens of pillowy folds in the fabric, each rendered with care. Farrand creates closely cropped compositions absent of sleeves, zippers, or bodily form, transforming a pervasive cultural object into abstraction. Soft light falls on the crests of creases in contrast with painted threads found in the shadow of a seam—there is romance in Farrand’s observations.

Farrand takes functionality out of context in order to better understand the language and meaning of materials and surface. His ongoing analyses of material aesthetics produces nuanced meditations on perception, at times fetishistic in nature or sublimely minimal, Farrand can even find a way to reveal humor or solace in raw material. Born into a family of highly skilled craftsmen, builders, and manufacturers, Farrand rebuilt cars, built musical instruments, drove combines, assembled boats, problem solved, and tinkered—a methodology of learning by doing.

Farrand’s puff paintings have emerged from his interest in marble as a sculptural material, as a natural resource, and as a signifier of permanence and societal authority. In the gridded landscape of the quarry created over thousands of years of marble extraction, Farrand found visual resonance with the seams of a downed jacket. The wrinkles in a painting of a puff jacket conjure the fleshy muscles of Greco-Roman gods draped in robes all exquisitely chiseled from a single block of marble—in fact Farrand often sources marble from the Carrara quarry that birthed such masterpieces from centuries ago.

The painted puffs reference the shifting colors of Farrand’s ominous Horizon works, with their reflective surfaces of aluminum chromate, but they also evoke the colors and textures found in the landscape of his painting studio on the Big Lost River in Idaho. Working on site during the summer of 2020 surrounded by smoke and fire, there is a tenderness to Farrand’s color selection—crimson, smoke, charcoal, hazy jewel tones—reflections of the man-made climate crisis creeping ever closer. The carved and painted puffs recontextualize an artificial material created within a manufacturing context into a larger and timely discourse. Farrand’s observations and technical abilities—form and content—provide great insight into individual perception and societal values.

Devin Farrand (b.1986, Salem, Oregon) makes paintings and sculptures that use his extensive knowledge of industrial fabrication techniques as both form and content as he moves beyond minimalism and Finish Fetish to pay tribute to his family lineage and the history of sculpture. Farrand earned an MFA in Ceramics from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, a BS in Art from Eastern Oregon University, and currently lives and works between rural Idaho and Los Angeles, CA. Farrand’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Ibid Gallery in Los Angeles, CA and London, United Kingdom; Good Weather Gallery in North Little Rock, AR; Gallery Vacancy in Shanghai, China; BBQLA in Los Angeles, CA; New Release Gallery in New York, NY; Gallery Kornfeld in Berlin, Germany; and Piasa in Paris, France. Farrand’s work can be found in collections including the Burger Collection in Hong Kong, China; Sishang Art Museum in Beijing China; SoHo House in Malibu, CA; New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan; Mercedes-Benz Financial Services in Farmington Hills, MI; Nightingale Gallery at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, OR; Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT; and the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection in West Palm Beach, FL.