WE HAVE (HAD) THE TECHNOLOGY

WE HAVE (HAD) THE TECHNOLOGY
Michael Coughlan

In the Project Room

KIDS OF THE BLACK HOLE
Edgar Bryan, Brad Phillips, Scott Reeder, Tyson Reeder, Adam Ross, Mungo Thomson, Leslie Vance, Tyler Vlahovich, Kent Young

Stalke Galleri was pleased to present the exhibition We Have (Had) the Technology, featuring works by Los Angeles–based artist Michael Coughlan. The exhibition included new paintings, drawings, and pastels and ran until January 8, 2005.

Coughlan used the codes of modernist art, emphasizing surrealism and the conceptual art of the 1930s. However, these codes were reinterpreted and distorted through his use of pop culture iconography, an illustrative style, and a wholly personal approach. His recent works also incorporated aspects of his surroundings in Los Angeles, such as abandoned urban landscapes and the specific character of light and decay that permeated them. Rather than directly pastiching a particular work or style, Coughlan employed convention-free strategies from both art history and pop culture to create new, idiosyncratic expressions. The results were both experiential and emotionally nuanced, balancing the humorous with the melancholic.

Coughlan’s imagery evolved through drawings and pen-on-paper studies, creating a process driven by automatic writing. This approach often produced unexpected characters. Each work developed as a dialogue between respect for its individual qualities and an attempt to challenge the conventions within its medium.

We Have (Had) the Technology was accompanied by a catalogue featuring full-color illustrations of all exhibited works and a text by Los Angeles writer Jan Tumlir.

Michael Coughlan held a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1988) and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (1991). He had received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1996) and had lived in New York and Los Angeles for the previous 13 years. His work had been exhibited at Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York, Works on Paper in Los Angeles, and in numerous group exhibitions. His recent exhibitions included Mama’s Boyat White Columns in New York and Eight Artistsat 4-F in Los Angeles.

In the Project Room

Michael Coughlan curated the exhibition Kids of the Black Hole, a group show featuring drawings and new works by recognized artists whose practices addressed existential and historical questions. The exhibition explored themes of subjectivity and the processing of modernist and postmodernist strategies. The title was borrowed from a song by the 1980s punk band The Adolescents. Both the title and the works in the exhibition conveyed a youthful energy and existential drama, expressed in both the artworks and the artists’ presentations. The exhibition also highlighted an artistic strategy that remained unfinished yet ongoing—a practice that had become a foundation in contemporary art.

Exhibition views from Michael Coughlan’s show at Stalke Galleri

Kids of The Black Hole

Project Room

Edgar Bryan, Brad Phillips, Scott Reeder, Tyson Reeder, Adam Ross, Mungo Thomson, Leslie Vance, Tyler Vlahovich, Kent Young.

Front Cover, Catalogue

In We Have (Had) the Technology, Michael Coughlan explored painting as a field of uncertainty, humor, and conceptual tension. His works moved between abstraction and representation, appearing at once familiar and strangely dislocated. Drawing on elements from art history, popular culture, and his own visual archive, Coughlan constructed images that hovered between intention and accident, seriousness and irony.

The paintings were rooted in a process that began with spontaneous drawings and evolved through selection, reduction, and transformation. Desert-like landscapes, fragmented objects, signs, and recurring motifs created a stage where meaning was constantly deferred. Humor played a central role—not as lightness, but as a critical strategy that questioned authority, tradition, and the conventions of painting itself.

Coughlan’s practice reflected an engagement with modernist ideas of flatness and materiality, while simultaneously undermining them through wit, melancholy, and ambiguity. Rather than seeking resolution, the works embraced contradiction and instability, presenting painting as an open-ended process in which something seemed to happen and not happen at the same tim

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