ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce They Both Ride Horses, new works by Cody Hudson in Gallery Two.

Chicago, IL, September 9, 2011- ANDREW RAFACZ begins the fall 2011 season with They Both Ride Horses, new works by Cody Hudson in Gallery Two. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. It continues through Saturday, October 15, 2011.

Cody Hudson works as a multimedia artist, but is often considered a painter and a graphic designer. Recently, he has focused on sculpture, introducing found and constructed wood forms, color and graphic images to his totemic structures. Ranging from tabletop constructions to large freestanding pieces, his three dimensional work has become a major focal point of his project as a whole. Here, Hudson presents sixteen new sculptures collected on an artist-designed pedestal in the center of the gallery. The entire space has also been wrapped in sheets of plywood, magnifying the found, slightly rough quality of the visual experience.

Included in the installation but considered a separate work, the artist has also editioned a new text piece fabricated as a neon sign. Glowing in an alien green, reminiscent of a bar or rock club sign, it reads, albeit upside down, “PUNKS NOT DEAD.” The use of neon as a medium as well as the statement’s physical inversion reveals a humorous tip of the hat to our culture’s preoccupation with declarations of the death of a movement or artistic practice. Perennially, statements such as “painting is dead” or “punk is dead” are imprudently declared. It is the declaration’s regular iteration that proves its own negation. Using neon, a medium often associated with the visual art of the seventies and eighties, and sometimes used ironically today, Hudson pokes fun at these assertions.

CODY HUDSON (American, b. 1971) lives and works in Chicago. Solo exhibitions include Let’s Do Some Living After We Die, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; I May Be Right and I May Be Wrong, but You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone: Notes On Building A Time Machine (with Sean Cassidy) at New Image Art, LA and This Ain’t No Bottomless Pit Here at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Group exhibtions include White Noise Drawn Together at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, 2008, and Throb Throb: Rock and Roll Currents in Chicago Today, curated by Dominic Molon, Chicago, 2007. He had a solo exhibition at Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, earlier this year. Several new paintings were included in Let Your Light In, Country Club, Los Angeles, in August. His work has been exhibited at fairs in New York, Basel, Los Angeles, and Miami.