John Houck
John Houck
John Houck is an American multi-disciplinary artist interested in psychoanalytic theories of memory and the mind. These themes permeate both subject matter and process in his photography-based work, for which he is well-known, as well as his recent foray into the genre of painting.
Central to Houck's practice is how shadows serve as signatures of both the condition and the limits of our experience. From subtly folded and rephotographed monochromatic papers to paintings of psychological landscapes overlaid by objects personal to the artist, Houck recasts the shadow as a hinge of illusion and illumination, as the point at which what is real overlaps with what we can know and what we can imagine.
Houck’s work is held in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among other institutions.
Houck lives and works in Los Angeles. He is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2010), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2008), and the University of California, Los Angeles MFA program (2007).
Image details: John Houck, Leadville, 2023, Oil on Linen, 42 x 50 inches. Photo credit: Kunning Huang (above and previous page).
IN CONVERSATION January 2024 by Jonathan T. D. Neil
