Lee Hoag, “Amalgams,” January 25, 2019 – March 2, 2019

Exhibition Catalog, Lee Hoag and Sheila Barcik

Hoag’s assemblage sculptures meticulously unite found objects to create new, unexpected forms. Attracted by the aesthetics of product design commonly found in “big box” and home goods stores, Hoag chooses his objects for their intentionally organic qualities. He strategically removes the utilitarian purpose of each object by tipping urns and toppling pots. Hoag then performs “object alchemy,” connecting disparate objects with contrasting industrial materials including black plumbing pipe, rubber gaskets, and flexible flanges. This juxtaposition helps to further erase the domestic duty originally intended by the manufacturers.

Although there is a gravity to the exhibition, Hoag does not take his artwork too seriously. The sculptures spill over pedestals, slide atop shelves, and slither across the floor. There is a deep sense that each may have once been animated and that the viewer is somehow moving through an alien museum of natural history. Well dosed with mystery, humor, and innuendo, Hoag’s sculptures conjure up a comfortable confusion that is, like the sculptures, both strange and somehow familiar.

Biography:

Hoag holds a MST in Art Education from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2000, Hoag was artist-in-residence at Freiluftgalerie Stotteritzn, an outdoor sculpture garden in Leipzig, Germany where he created a new work for their annual invitational exhibition. Hoag, a National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) trained sign language interpreter, retired in 2016 from a 30 year career as an educational interpreter. In 2017 he staged a multimedia retrospective exhibition, HOAG/25 YEARS, at RIT/NTID Dyer Arts Center, Ohringer Gallery, in Rochester, NY. Hoag’s sculpture, What A Blast (2016), is on display in the permanent collection there at the NTID, and is dedicated to the legacy of his late father, Dr. Ralph L. Hoag, who played a lead role in the 1960s with others in the origin and establishment of NTID.