Art Collective DOSSHAUS Continues the Legacy of Pop Art

The Editors

 

Downtown Los Angeles’s Corey Helford Gallery is currently featuring a new solo show from Los Angeles-based, award-winning collective DOSSHAUS.

 

Founded in 2011, DOSSHAUS is the nom de guerre of David Connelly, whose work blends painting, sculpture, installation, photography, fashion, video, and performance; using recycled cardboard from the alleyways of Los Angeles, paper, and acrylic paint as their primary mediums, to create his own highly idealized universe.

 

According to Connelly, “DOSSHAUS began has as an experiment in the continuum of Pop Art. I’ve always had a strong attachment to Pop. When I first engaged with the work of Warhol, Kruger, Johns, Haring and others, I was struck by how these artists could take seemingly superficial imagery and re-contextualize it in a way that made me think and feel so deeply. Pop gave the power back to the artist, wresting the determination of what qualifies as art away from collectors and curators who eventually came to follow the artists’ lead on the subject. Pop turned ideas into art. It demanded attention by asking questions like, ‘If art is everywhere, what is art?’ The answer, Pop suggested to me, was ‘You decide.’ As an artist, that opened a whole world to me.

 

Lately, I’ve found myself wanting to reengage with the aspects of Pop Art that drew me to the movement in the first place:  Pop as the replication/re-contextualization of images, Pop as portraiture, Pop as protest, Pop as celebration. This is a show about ideas firing fast and direct from many angles. Yet every piece in the show will have at least one piece in direct conversation."

 

The exhibit is on view through July 3 at Corey Helford Gallery (Los Angeles).

 

 

About DOSSHAUS:

 

DOSSHAUS is an art collective founded in 2011 and the current nom de guerre of David Connelly. Created in response to a society saturated with social media-generated images in which reality itself seems all the more relative, DOSSAHAUS uses recycled cardboard, paper, and acrylic to create its own highly idealized universe. This cardboard world is at once separate from and a product of modern culture.

 

DOSSHAUS have taken part in more than 20 group art exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York and Miami; they staged their first solo exhibition at Gregorio Escalante Gallery in Los Angeles (February 2016); followed by their second major solo show in L.A. at Corey Helford Gallery (April 2018), entitled Paper-Thin Hotel, an immersive, multi-room exhibit of cardboard sculptures centered around the theme of the American Dream.

 

DOSSHAUS has often paid homage to the music that influences their art. In advance of the Paper-Thin Hotel exhibition, DOSSHAUS released a double 7” single (2017) by the same name (“Paper-Thin Hotel”), in collaboration with Sympathy for the Record Industry. The limited-edition single release examines the role of visual art in music and has the distinction of being the first officially released record to be made entirely of cardboard.

 

DOSSHAUS received the award for Outdoor Sculpture at the 2018 Lucca Biennale in Lucca, Italy, and have been featured in Juxtapoz, Hi-Fructose, ELLE, VICE, and on the cover of LA Weekly, as well as in Lori Zimmer's 2015 anthology, The Art of Cardboard (Rockport Publishers).

 

 

 

 

 

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All images courtesy of Corey Helford Gallery
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