Bowry Lane - 9th December 2010 - 6th February 2011
SEE OUR ANIMATED INVITE BY PHILIP LINNEMANN HERE:
Charles Bank Gallery is proud to present its inaugural Bowry Lane group exhibition, 9 December 2010 - 6 February 2011.
Taking the colorful, artistic and tumultuous history of the Bowery in Manhattan as a departure point, these shows will unite artists affiliated with New York City and highlight trajectories and tendencies within the City's contemporary art scene. For more information on the Bowery's past please follow this link.
For this Bowry Lane exhibition the body of work all has elements of intentional manipulations of form, content and material. The works all concentrate on breaking points be they literal or due to an oversaturation or overloading of change. These perspectives all also highlight something very introspective where the outward faces of the work eventually turn back on us and confront the way we deal with art, concepts, ideas and reality.
Sean Dack deliberately corrupts his photographic work. Digital image files are produced through the control of pixels and by binary codes of ones and zeros. At times these files are corrupted producing uncontrollable effects and new images, both highlighting the fragility of the system, but also making us see things anew. Using custom software he has created, Dack deliberately corrupts the formatting of pixels underpinning digital images. In essence Dack creates a proverbial 'ghost in the machine' which momentarily takes control and transforms digital images into glitched icons where normal narratives transcend themselves and new layers are revealed through the instability of the work and the process.
Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe's work comes from their new Bright White Underground series and is inspired by Dr. Cook and his psychotropic experiments in the 1960's. Freeman and Lowe re-envisioned the events in the historic Buck House in LA, by inviting 50 people to participate in full-scale happenings and séances. They then followed up with a complete transformation of The Buck House, making it appear as if it had been abandoned since the original experiments of the 60's. Layer by layer, the work reveals itself through its systematic recreation of imagined events as well the corruption time would have had on the Buck House had it been abandoned. Like a journey into a psychedelic trip we are confronted with the passion and modern day rituals of a drug culture, as well the paranoia and come down which inevitably flows in it's wake.
Kim Keever produces oversaturated images where clouds filled with the brightest of hues float over dreamy landscapes. There is a grainy texture to the work and a sense of hyperbolic romanticism. On closer inspection the works reveals an eeriness in it's implausible construction. The works are, in fact, not natural and the landscapes do not exist beyond the massive water tank in which Keever creates them. The scenes are built from scratch and the water filled environment ultimately is injected with dyes in order to produce cloud and underwater water formations. This leaves Keever with only a few moments to capture the scenery, in essence having a closer affiliation with historic romantic painting than any naturalist photographic process.
Adina Popescu's work creates a careful alignment between beauty and carnage. Slowed down and focused moving imagery of explosions are combined with music in order to produce a stunning macabre dance of items easily recognizable as belonging to our everyday contemporary lives. There is a tension between the violence and destruction playing itself out in front of us and the sheer beauty and seemingly choreographed movements of vernacular items dancing through air. The uprootedness of the situation almost beckons us to take a position in favor of either the destructive or the sublime. Though, ultimately, these are so intrinsically bound together that one would not exist without the other.
THE END, PART I, (Zabriskie Point) is an assemblage of explosions taken from found footage that form a hypnotic motion with the music that is accompanying it. This work is the fist part of a series THE END I-IV that explores highly seductive notions of Destruction or Ending as a collective fantasy. The videos are props that appear in the staging of her play "Love is colder than Death - Fassbinder revisited 2012".
Shoplifter's colourful hair works combine as many qualities of the material as possible; from liveliness, self-image and beauty to vanity, fashion and frailness. Using one of the most recognizable materials available to us Shoplifter creates an anarchic process where seemingly everything is possible. There is an insistence that we have to be serious about the abstract and the humorous - that bright and tightly knit strands of hair can serve both as a volcanic vortex consuming all above and beneath it, but also a solid foundation for even more fragile structures. The belief in the beauty, vanity and symbolism of hair ends up highlighting the often displaced sense of importance we put on everyday items that could, in essence, be used to produce things of wonder.
Gibb Slife amasses articles, images and texts from a wide variety of newspapers and magazines and combines them in forms that highlight the timelessness in the way news is presented to us, both through style and content. The narratives cross time and space through the pastiche method they are made from. There is a bold vibrancy to the work stemming from both the content, but also the dimensions and the material used. The work becomes hyper-real, the bold colors suck us in, and the mirrored works becomes double reflective with text that almost floats in the air. The fallibility of supposedly objective news media is evident, but the art, beauty and manipulation is even more so.