Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff:
These are images of barriers: the balcony, the computer screen, the relationship and the body, all framing the frame. The imaging of each other -- the hotel room -- the couple as a force of isolation, creating an intimacy that has the ability to block out the surrounding reality.
They are photographs of what can be taken without being completely understood -- part fetish of a consumable history, the supposed weight of the ancient replacing the need for the immediate. The photos are huge, with blurry, intimate bodies in the foreground gazing out to the sharp but distant monuments in the background -- revealing a lack of a middle ground, something between the personal and the historical, which hides in the subtext of the larger crisis unfurling in the streets below. In the photos our bodies act as measurements within systems (art, tourism, international politics), playing the role of artist as speculator within a global economy.
Rochelle Feinstein:
I felt pleasure in making this painting, but had little interest in it as a singular entity. Meaning is often slippery, indefinite and subject to translations, whether individual or collectivized. Painting becomes both a device for translations and an anchor. The image Who Cares signifies abstract painting’s hallmarks: surface, gesture, color; yet it lacks materiality. Here the surface renders continuously. The hand, regardless of the numbers of iterations, always adheres to a single, thin plane disembodied from its substrate, managing to persist and to remain active.
The expression Who Cares abandons the expressive uptick of punctuation, existing neither as a response nor as a declaration. Who Cares, both in form and language, proposes a need for distance and presents itself as a condition of being in the world. Currently five Who Cares are in existence. The template, or “original”, is a painting made of leftover paint and bits of fabric that were formed into high and low relief. The template work – I hope – would conjure a resemblance to many other abstractions from the mid-twentieth century to this time. Both works appearing in The New Norm are printed from different files, each originating from one photograph at a 1:1 ratio to the 50 in x 50 inch “original”. Who Cares has been made as a duet work: the color image on the left, and its desaturated double on the right, a bitmapped halftone image that exists not unlike yesterday’s news, but today’s. The similarities between each object are contingent on substrate, printer, quality of ink, just as the existing conditions for their display will change. I cannot predict any of those circumstances intended for a rough ride.
Isabelle Cornaro:
I find it difficult to work with pop culture because, in my opinion, it is already overflowing with meaning. Most importantly, pop tends to generate a positive, sentimental relationship to culture that I find unproductive. I prefer working with objects that make me ill at ease. This unsympathetic relationship to my source material creates a tension that I much prefer. Of Money; Shot in Profile and Three-Quarter (16mm film, transferred to digital) is a succession of profile and three-quarter static medium and long shots of gold coins and paper money: Historical and mythological figures (often portrayed on coins and bills in profile, ) and lines (the coin’s ridges and the bill’s edges), are organized geometrically in relation to the frame’s borders. This tableau is successively broken down and reconstructed by flickering, colored shadows. A generic representation of money in its different modes of existence: as an object itself and as a virtual form, its raw (and possibly added) value – the precious material of the coins – as well as its symbolic one.
Kelley Walker:
Revisiting Robert Rauschenberg’s Flatbed Aesthetic, Park Avenue is a collage composed directly on the artist’s scanner. A bare-bone fetishistic and fragile model of a ‘painting', that of a surface stretched on a frame (here a woman’s nylon pantyhose wrenched by twigs), a portrait of Reverend Martin Luther King, an image of of paint drips for good artistic measure, and a yellow ribbon (a public show of support for the troops serving abroad), all work towards a composite semi-biographical and effectively public composite image of the repressed sexual and racial tensions that define the deep South of the United States, where the artist’s originates from.This work is part of the artist early foray into digital technology, whereby collectors and institutions acquire a cd-rom with an image that can be reproduced, printed and, most radically, circulated however they sees fit.
Depz:
We joined forces and founded DEPZ, a brand committed to propose thinking patterns on fabrics. We don’t go out scavenging for things, we saunter the city plains – on lazy legs and distracted eyes – and come to meet them. Trials leave traces of memories on matter. In crime series, the forensic surgeon reconstructs the crime and recovers the murderer by tracing evidence of the lethal weapon on the tissue around the wound. Then he pulls back the cloth over the head and puts her to rest. The items we dress in and dress our spaces with carry evidence of our condition. Dress is personal, self-conscious, cultural and local; it involves the geography of the land, the syntax of the spoken language, the conformation of our bodies, our customs and our secrets. Dress covers, protects and hides and dress communicates the story of its bearer. Dress is an agent of power, it parcels and brands the entity or void it contains, dress is political. Making a play on the word applied, we imagined patterns of textures applied on fabric surfaces which would then be applied back on the streets and our bodies disturbing the time continuum of the cognitive process by superimposing relational narratives. Dora Economou is a sculptor.
Simone Forti:
And I realized that moving and speaking, if you already have a rational organization of what you’re going to say, moving and speaking stay very separate. But if you have some awareness of the stream of consciousness that is going on - and it goes on, and you can tap into that and use it- then moving and speaking, both functions, can be responding to the thoughts you have before you have organized them or translate them into language syntax. And I love the way they kind of throw each other off their timing. In speaking you would say something and then you would say something and then you would look for the next thing that relates; but then maybe as you’re moving you look that way and you see a shape. And it reminds me...it’s reminding me of something...