Re/Post (2015)
June 5 - July 2, 2015 — Storefront Ten Eyck (Brooklyn, NY)
Participating Artists: Philip Hackworth Ashley, Pedro Barbeito, Adolfo Bimer, Lydia Dona, Franklin Evans, Alejandro Leonhardt, Fabian Marcaccio, Martha Mysko, Willie Wayne Smith, and Rafael Vega.
Re/Post is a group exhibition posited as a response to the notion that there is an 'always there' there to the practice of painting. Each of the ten participating artists challenges the act of seeing through the subversive use of materiality to deny the fixity of the still image. Through the dissolution and reconstituting of concepts, personal preoccupations, readymade imagery, and digital and physical artifacts, these artists externalize the complexity of expanding awareness beyond the self in the Digital Age to evolve a personal language that vacillates between abstraction and representation.
These works do not attempt to operate in a 1:1 ratio between image and object, a WYSIWYG [i] strategy of the prevailing, reductivist aesthetic that is intrinsically fungible, indulgent of the desire for speed, and which lulls the viewer into a safe space of the already-seen. Instead, the works in this exhibition introduce varying degrees of friction and chaos into this yawning cavern of perception, what participating artist Fabian Marcaccio has termed the “treacherous gaze.” [ii]
Given the prevalence of interpreting and digesting images through the exclusive site of the mediating layer of the monitor and ever-shrinking screens – a territory for vision that is negotiated through the thumbnail and circulated through, most commonly, the compressed industry standard of the JPEG [iii] – the included works go against the general regression in pictorial approaches in ways that defiantly expand and collapse the phenomenological gap between image and object.