Vokoun’s presentation, and debut with the gallery, represents a collection of new mixed media paintings created in response to the artist’s month-long residency in 2016 at Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico, part of the National Parks Arts Foundation (NPAF) residency program in association with Chaco Culture National Historical Park of the National Park Service. This series of paintings was inspired by Vokoun’s reflection on the architecture, mark making, and symbolism of ancient Chacoan culture in contrast to our contemporary, technology-driven lives. The ground of many of the paintings is comprised of horizontal bands of color transitioning from ivories and blues at the top to fiery pinks, reds and oranges in the center that finally transition to earth tones at the bottom. These bands reference the reductive landscape and hues observed at sunrise and sunset in Chaco Canyon. Vokoun then laser cuts into the bands of pigment his computer data driven digital imagery that layers a new geometric vocabulary on top.

Vokoun designs on the computer, playing with corrupted data, and then he paints on canvases that are often laser-cut to line precision. “The horizons I see in this work are the New Mexico vistas I’ve been living with for a long time,” he says. “At Chaco I was influenced by the way the Earth comes up and meets the sky. It seems their whole structure and civilization was built that way, reflecting geography and topography, like those buildings were meant to reach the sky.”

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