Reclamation

Augustine Kofie, Erik Otto

Heron Arts is pleased to present RECLAMATION, a duo exhibition featuring about forty artworks by Augustine Kofie and Erik Otto. The opening reception is August 23rd, 2025 from 6-9pm. It is free and open to the public. The exhibition will be on view until September 18th, by appointment only.

Kofie & Otto investigate liminal planes of our existence within RECLAMATION. Kofie is currently rebounding from the devastating Eaton Canyon Fires that affected most of Altadena back in January 8, 2025. Because of this unforeseen inferno, he lost his home, studio, library, personal archive and shrine to everything he loves about art and media. Kofie is still coping with an identity chasm due to this natural disaster. For RECLAMATION, Kofie is reviving his collage-based practice which employs heaps of found vintage pressboard, curating colors and shapes with a futurist aesthetic. This exhibition highlights his resilience, experiencing such a terrible tribulation only to spring back into his creative passion and begin collecting and creating again. Many of the pieces in RECLAMATION use his own materials made from ceriograph printing, while also using contemporary pressboard and posterboard, similar to the types of vintage packaging he is known for in his collages.

For Otto, RECLAMATION is a reckoning with grief induced by a sequential loss of loved ones and a personal incident that affected him physically. Like Kofie, Otto felt stumped identity-wise. Through the act of creating, he found himself rediscovering enthusiasm for his practice. Otto emerged from this stagnation by finding new pathways to express this intense wave of existentialism. He found a new intention in his practice, engaging with similar themes from before but also incorporating improvisational approaches, allowing for a finished product that contrasts with his early work. Otto focused on being material-forward, flowing with gestural marks and allowing for luminous layers to optically blend an array of hues. His exploration of control and release are his own reclamation of his artistic voice.

ARTIST STATEMENTS

Augustine Kofie

ROTATIONSHIPS is Augustine Kofie stripped down to the essence of his practice. The series reflects the artist’s longstanding interests in salvaging the forgotten remnants of the past and elevating these through futurist aesthetics. For years, the artist has obsessively collected, archived, and repurposed pressboard, a heavy, multi-ply paper stock used in packaging and office supplies from the 1950s to the 1980s. Previously, pressboard appears as the hidden architecture of Kofie’s collages, subsequently covered with layers of paint, ink, and spray. In ROTATIONSHIPS, the only “paint” used is the colored pressboard itself; brushes only apply adhesive and varnish.

Even when painting, Kofie describes his process as one of building. In this series, construction is centered in a series of “rotationships,” a word the artist coined to describe his ongoing relationship with circular forms, which always represent the feminine ideal in his work, taming and controlling the more hard-edged, angular elements. Here, circles are everything—centered, interlinked, stretched into oblongs, layered transparencies—in different explorations of joining.

Kofie’s respect for pressboard stems from its durability, malleability, and shelf appeal: it can be scored, folded, coated, screen-printed, embossed, while retaining its structural integrity. Steno notepads, file folders, album covers, industrial packaging—pressboard often packages old technologies from a predigital, bygone era. The artist has sourced this modest refuse of the past at estate sales in the greater Los Angeles area (as well as flea markets the world over), from the homes, workshops, and garages of the elderly, who saved everything, when things were made to last.

Curated by Heron Arts director Tova Lobatz, ROTATIONSHIPS (2022) was Augustine Kofie’s first time showing this body of work. RECLAMATION, Kofie’s two-man show with Erik Otto, is the second installment of this series, and Kofie’s first works made since he lost his Altadena home and home studio to the Eaton Canyon Fire in January 2025. A lifetime’s archive of pressboard ephemera went up in flames there. Every piece in RECLAMATION is made entirely of materials gathered since January 15, 2025. Look closely and you’ll find street-level posters put up by vendors in Altadena to advertise dumping, cleaning and hauling of materials post-fire. As Kofie explains, “What’s more important, the reclamation of the materials that I lost or the reclamation of me? In and of itself, Rotationships is a reclaiming of material and a reexamining of packaging and ephemera from the 1960s-1980s that people consider useless. But this show is also about me reclaiming time, reclaiming my life. The fire stopped everything, it ground me completely to a halt. So I needed to get back to work with a purpose. And this show was the purpose.”

Erik Otto

My current work lives in the space between loss and renewal, between the seen and hidden. After a recent wave of losses in close succession, the ground beneath me began to shift. Grief unraveled the familiar, and in that, something quieter and more enduring began.

This new series reflects a departure. I let go of the circular form that once anchored my work, breaking my cycle of comfort. Instead, I am creating landscapes that are fluid, open, and atmospheric. Pours of saturated color, washes pulled and dissolved, create surfaces that feel still and fleeting, yet heavy
with presence.

My materials represent my journey: transformation, transmutation, renewal. With soft blends of color set against contrasting textures, I am trying to map the spirit that lingers beyond matter. The auras. The soul. The memories. The weightless form of love through grief. This work holds contradictions. They echo the turbulence of sudden loss, the push and pull of identity untethering, and the slow, imperfect rebirth that follows. Each piece is built from layers that wash away and return again, pulling apart and building up, asking the viewer to linger in the unresolved. The palette is shifting too, shaped by intense emotion and showing those rare moments of clarity that follow upheaval. It reflects our world when it is turned sideways and invites us to stand still in the flux to listen.

My work isn’t about answers. It’s about creating the right conditions for something unseen to appear. About capturing the moment when shock quiets into stillness, when grief and grace meet, when life, in all its turbulence, begins again. This is my attempt to paint what cannot be named. The spirit that moves within us. The fragments from the past we carry. The places where loss gives way to find beauty in uncertainty.

ARTIST BIOS

Born and based in Los Angeles and active in the Southern California graffiti scene since the early nineties, multimedia artist Augustine Kofie (b. 1973, of African and European ancestry) works in painting, collage and mural interventions. Kofie’s post-graffiti fine art practice draws together the languages of mechanical drafting, constructivism, modernist collage, and architecture, creating a unique take on abstraction at times referred to as Vintage Futurism. Kofie has been featured in Juxtapoz, Graffiti Art Magazine,The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti, the Getty Research Institute’s LA Liber Amicorum (2014) and the monograph The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti (Susan Phillips, 2019). His work is in both national and international private collections and has appeared on numerous book and album covers. Recent exhibitions include State of Mind, Hashimoto Contemporary, New York City (2021); ROTATIONSHIPS. Heron Arts, San Francisco (2022); 1970s / GRAFFITI / TODAY, Phillips Gallery, NYC (2022); UNDERCURRENTS, Chenus Longhi Gallery, Paris (2023). Recent mural commissions include vert aurore, for the Grenoble Street Art Festival (2023) and Monument of Love: Mother and Child, a three-man mural for the City of Los Angeles’ Destination Crenshaw project (2024). In January 2025, Kofie lost his Altadena home and home studio to the Eaton Canyon Fire. Since then, he has been the recipient of a Rema Hort Mann LA Fire Artist Support Grant, a Center for Cultural Innovation - LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund Grant, an Aid For Artists Emergency Artist Grant, and a Grief & Hope Emergency Relief Grant.

Erik Otto is a painter, muralist, and mixed media artist working in NYC with commissions and collections placed around the world. His work is a colorful, glowing response to a life laced with loss, reunions, and recoveries. A San Francisco Bay Area native, Otto graduated from San Jose State University with a degree in Illustration. With 20 years of experience, he has produced work with an ever-evolving choice of materials that have been exhibited nationally and internationally. His work is held in multiple private collections, including Google, Adobe, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Uber, AIA, Grand Hyatt, RedBull, Andreessen Horowitz, and multiple others. Otto currently lives and works in New York City.