FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Kristi Engle Gallery
5002 York Ave.
Highland Park, CA 90042
323.472.6237
kristi@kristienglegallery.com

“Oscar Wilde famously remarked: ‘I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.’ Wilde's stance was almost confrontationally dishonest, as Wilde himself stood at the forefront of a movement to conflate life and work, person and product, interior and exterior. This movement later came to be called ‘the twentieth century.’

Joel Huschle's work has documented his personal response to mass culture for over twenty years. Most of this work has been in the form of rock music, which lost its tragic battle with culture sometime after the release of The Lost Boys, and so most of it occurs in contexts inhospitable to sober reflection. The Kristi Engle Gallery presents several items which have heretofore enjoyed strictly covert circulation among friends and disbelieving strangers, as well as newer works from his ongoing “Visual Nutrients” project, which he has threatened to terminate on no fewer than five occasions. For the display of these once-private responses to public images, Joel has designed restrictive viewing contexts, closing a circle that began with broad strokes, general truths and anonymous faces. Bosses would call these new contexts “challenging,” or, worse, “special.” That is why these people get to be the boss.

All this makes the work sound rather more serious than it is. Smearing the line between serious and funny could be said to be another of Joel’s central projects, if it didn’t sound so awful to put it that way. So never mind. Joel is a native of southern California, though he has family from Minnesota. "How about that.” -John Darnielle .

Kristi Engle Gallery devotes itself primarily to solo exhibitions of new works by contemporary artists. It is located in Highland Park, near the corner of Ave. 50 and York Blvd.