Bio

John Houck (b. 1977) is an American multi-disciplinary artist whose work is held in the collections of The Whitney, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Hammer, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art, amongst other institutions. He is a graduate of the Whitney ISP, Skowhegan, and UCLA's MFA program. Central to Houck's practice is how shadows serve as signatures of both the condition and the limits of our experience. If everything we see is reflected light, then the world that shows up for us is by definition a world of shadows continuously cast upon us. From subtly folded and rephotographed monochromatic papers, to paintings of psychological landscapes overlaid by objects personal to the artist, Houck recasts the shadow as a hinge of illusion and illumination, as the point at which what is real overlaps with what we can know and what we can imagine.