Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to present Molly Gochman’s Drenched which is in conjunction with the FotoFest 2018. This 17th Biennial FotoFest 2018 will run from March 10 to April 22, 2018 with participating art spaces across the city. Molly Gochman’s Drenched will be on view at Deborah Colton Gallery from March 8 to April 21 with an Opening Reception from 6:00 to 9:00 pm on Thursday March 8th, that includes an Artist Talk and Walk Through the exhibition from 7:00 to 8:00 pm. On Saturday, March 10th, at 2:30 pm Sara Auster will lead a sound bath meditation as an enhancement to the exhibition.
Drenched will combine three bodies of works: Before, Waterfalls Wept and Surrogates. Alone, these works represent many different things. Together, they seek to explore, in the context of both Houston and India, the myriad ways water works to build, destroy, connect, devour and grow.
Before, specifically, is an examination of life in Houston after Hurricane Harvey and in India after the extreme flooding. Harvey was the costliest tropical cyclone on record, inflicting nearly $200 billion in damage all over Houston. In a four-day period, it became the wettest storm on record in the country. And the resulting floods inundated hundreds of thousands of homes, displaced more than 30,000 people and resulted in 100 deaths.
Meanwhile, as a result of heavy monsoon rains that led to flooding in South Asia, more than 1,200 people died across India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Over 40 million people were immediately affected by the devastation, and 1.8 million children were left out of school — but the numbers continued to grow with time.
The images Gochman created for Before are memorials to the emotional loss caused by flooding. She combined images of flood-damaged personal items and parts of homes that became piles of trash with images of fabric, and transferred them onto aluminum.
“All of the images I saw of flooded towns and cities in India depicted brown water — the same color as the water in Houston, Port Arthur, Galveston and Rockport. The fabric you see reminds me of the colors of India, these disasters and of water,” Gochman said.
Molly Gochman is an interdisciplinary, conceptual artist and activist based in New York City. Gochman has exhibited her work at Lincoln Center, New York; Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston; Diverse Works, Houston; Chashama, New York; Sara Roney Gallery, Sydney; Grace Farms, New Canaan; Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston; Zilkha Hall, Houston; Elsewhere, Greensboro; and other traditional and non-traditional exhibition spaces. Gochman is known for activating public spaces and creating participatory experiences through large and small scale installations.
Deborah Colton Gallery is founded on being an innovative showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists world-wide, whose diverse practices include painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, photography, performance and conceptual future media and public space installations. The gallery aspires to provide a forum through connecting Texas, national and international artists to make positive change.
