Ochi Gallery is pleased to present Promiseland, our first solo show with New York- based artist Erin Rachel Hudak.

Large, brightly colored paintings and series of small, hopeful collaged pieces make up the body of work aptly titled Promiseland.  With each piece Hudak explores the act of storytelling.  Layering myths, fairytales, personal narratives, and historical references Hudak creates collages of found images and paint using her honest, playful style.  Revealing a darker sense of irony, Hudak’s metaphorically charged imagery demonstrates that personal history is irreconcilably intertwined with a complicated American history.

Pulling her images from Americana, Hudak incorporates quilt patterns, lanterns, baskets, feathers, fires and even wolves into her works.  Interested in where “our” story as Americans intersects with her personal story, Hudak’s images become multifaceted.  Promiseland, the painting for which the show is titled, is an image of a loosely painted American Seal showing the traditional eagle holding thirteen arrows in its left talon, but missing the olive branch in its opposing talon.  Fire—a prominent theme in Hudak’s works, is the place where we’ve gathered to tell stories for centuries.  The fire image mimics the image of a crown, or a headdress—both weighted symbols in American history that also hold childhood memories for Hudak.

Hudak’s symbols act as the vernacular of the American story, exploring imagery behind cultural identity.  Incorporating text tugs even further at our personal perception within a

collective American memory.  Wry phrases, such as, “I have much to tell you” and “This is where we begin,” are abstruse in their simplicity. Hudak’s singular images and laconic phrases are far more complex in their commentary about America’s past and present, and our tenuous understanding of what it means to be an individual within it.

Hudak was born in Stow, Ohio in 1978. She attended Allegheny College to study art and literature and received her B.F.A from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Hudak has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her artwork has recently been shown at Women Made Gallery in Chicago, ArtHamptons, and featured in Vogue Girl Korea, Art+Culture.com, and written up in the Village Voice, and The Brooklyn Eagle.

LOVE YOU FOREVER: INSTALLATION

On February 17^th, 2012, Hudak will install a variation of her piece Love you Forever in Sun Valley, Idaho.  Originally installed under the Brooklyn Bridge, Love you Forever was made of silver and gold mylar balloons floating just off of the Brooklyn waterfront.  An adoring public service announcement to New York, the installation became, if only for just a few days, a celebrated destination.

In Idaho, accounting for weather, the piece will mimic balloons, but be fashioned out of fabric.  In the Festival Meadows, across from Sun Valley’s iconic red barn, Hudak’s message of everlasting adulation will ironically be temporary, but lastingly moving.

CATALOGUE OF WORKS