Now here, nowhere:
Mike Calway-Fagen and Tim Tozer

Now here, nowhere promotes the imperative nature of improvisation and “unrehearsed delivery”. This essential, experimental provisionality is shared in the works of Mike Calway-Fagen and Tim Tozer. While their process differs, Tozer creates mixed media paintings with acrylic and spray paint and Calway-Fagen deploys video, photography, sculpture and performance to create his installations, they both allow process, accidents and unexpected relationships to play a prominent role in their respective narratives.

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Mike Calway-Fagen stages possibilities through video, photography, found objects, sculpture, and performance. He assembles fragments; of events, sites, and artifacts whose remnants are collected and transfigured, creating new experience, fresh perspective, and revelation. Calway-Fagen will construct a mobile installation stage and wall for the exhibition. The mobile stage and wall function as presentation vehicle for a series of works; one of which, Resurrecting Revolt, is a documentary photograph of a public intervention enacted at Cabrillo National Monument in Southern California. The intervention saw an aerial advertising banner printed with the dying words of Chief Antonio Garra flown counterclockwise around Point Loma. Another element of the installation will include vinyl prints documenting a piece assembled at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, where Mike travelled to a scrap yard, photographed a pile of steel scrap, purchased the 10,000 pound pile, and transported it back to the Bemis. There, using the documentation, he recreated the pile, welding each piece in place to create a solid object. He then returned it to the scrap yard where it had originally been purchased, sold it back to them, and had it dropped in its original location. The piece, Honeydew Cantaloupe, now exists as two large photographic prints and will appear in league, with a text-based video, human kidney stones, cast bronze ginseng roots, collage works, and the mobile exhibition wall and platform. On opening night Calway-Fagen will fresh-squeeze grapefruit juice for gallery visitors atop the sculptural platform.

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Tim Tozer’s paintings are investigations with acrylic and spraypaint, part of a series titled, Black Mass. The work is bold and stark, hinting at a map or floor plan of an ambiguous nature, connections slipping in and out of reason. His paintings are puzzle pieces of opaque black on white fields, flirting with pure abstraction and representation simultaneously, refuting categorization or any willingness to relinquish mystery. Tozer describes his process as “compressing the distance between competing desires, which precipitates the possibility of meaning within the search for concrete formal relationships. This process – like any direct human interaction – is physical and improvised, demanding flexibility and persistence. “

Mike Calway-Fagen is a visual artist, writer, and curator based in the Midwest where he teaches at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. He received a BFA from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and an MFA from the University of California San Diego. Mike has attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, been a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and Franconia Sculpture Park. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally; with a recent solo exhibition at Ditch Projects in Portland, OR and a 4-person show at Dimensions Variable in Miami, FL. In 2015 Mike mounted curatorial projects in San Diego, CA, Indianapolis, IN, and Nashville, TN.

Tim Tozer is a visual artist from the United Kingdom and Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin-Stout in Foundations and Painting. He received his BA with honors at University of Ulster at Belfast, Northern Ireland and his MFA in Painting at The New York Academy of Art. Tozer is represented by the Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis and has recently exhibited in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Wales. His work is also included in the permanent collection of the Weisman Art Museum.

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