January 14th - February 5th, 2023
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to announce Overbody, a multimedia group exhibition by LA-based artists Megan Dune, Dylan Jones, and Taylor Woods. Through diverse methods and media, the artists have created unified works that utilize their own bodies as sites for narrative exploration and fantastical projection. Upon entering the gallery, viewers will be confronted with a vibrant and overwhelming scene, as bodies of clay and paint, mosaicked fabric, and projected worlds coalesce into an immersive ecosystem of flesh and memory.
Overbody explores the themes of lived simultaneity, the mutualism that exists within and between organisms, and the body as a wonderful, but limited, vessel through which we gather all of our earthly information and arrive at notions of the truth. The work in Overbody distorts and moves between human bodies to gather and convey information about life. The artists’ boundless explorations of the body question the first-person perspectives to which we often feel so tightly tied and instead suggest a wider and more multimodal vantage point from which to view our lives, within which each of us is welcome to find solace.
Megan Dune was born in Portland, Oregon and now lives and paints in Los Angeles, California. Impulsive by nature, she is a multimedia artist exploring the boundaries between fragmentation and integration. Dune’s art represents playful yet determined experimentation to convey flows of consciousness, territorize chaos, and ponder the great wonder that is our existence. Intrigued and humored by human processes, she peers out upon them from the widest perspective – that we are blips living extraordinary lives upon a planet in an infinitely expanding universe. This perspective is the thread that sews her work together. There is no subject too small or meaningless to find its way into her work, and the jumps between subjects and composition, as well as the connections between them, intend to replicate the conditions and curiousness of our existence.
Dylan Jones is a Bay Area born multimedia artist whose work is informed by a fascination with ecological systems, human infrastructure, and narrative processes. Using his own body and memories as a biological substrate, he has created a dense lexicon of recurring deities and creatures that populate his compositions and perform various biological and metaphysical roles inside a constantly evolving fantasy ecosystem. He is fascinated by the fluid relationship between the individual body and the broader environments, communities, and narratives that they inhabit. His works in paint, sculpture, and video can be read as a metanarrative of self-discovery, where the idea of individuality and selfhood is constantly being eroded, chewed up, and spit back out.
Taylor Woods is an accomplished production designer, scenic painter, and animator based in the Los Angeles area. While attending USC’s Roski School of Fine Arts, Taylor first began to work on live action and animated films. Her work has been featured in multiple award-winning films, both animated and live-action, and won USC’s Ruth Weisberg Prize for Drawing, along with a grant for her own solo art exhibition, Compulsive Corruption. Since graduating, Taylor has spent the majority of her time as a freelance production designer and scenic painter, combining these skills to create immersive experiences of her work. She uses vaginal images, spirals, and the distorted female body most commonly in her work. Through these stories, she aims to guide the viewer through a nearly over stimulating experience about identity, femininity- or the lack of it- and idea or thought transferal. Taylor aims to portray and contain generational thought cycles while implicating the user in their continuation by incorporating the viewer into the immersive art piece. The viewer will leave questioning their role in the artwork, and how that affects people in their own lives.