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13/4/2012

Jason Salavon - Stephanie Washburn

Mark Moore Gallery (new location), Culver City

Jason Salavon
Tragedy of the Commons

For the second time, Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by new media artist Jason Salavon. "Tragedy of the Commons" will showcase Salavon's distinctive mastery of self-authored software, which source and reconfigure cultural data into visual compositions. Abstracted into composite images and patterns, statistics and mass culture become conceptual diagrams for our social insatiability – representational not so much in figuration, but rather in discerning observation.

For this body of work, Salavon meticulously recorded one week's worth of programming on three major television stations: HBO, CNN, and ESPN. Composing the millions of resulting frames into frenetic blocks, stripes, and pixels of color, he typifies the habitual nature of television programming through a conceptual portrait of demand. Bands of color stretch across an otherwise variegated backdrop, indicating repeat transmissions, branding strategies, and scheduling patterns through a purposefully detached surveillance. Presented in a substantial scale, the teeming motifs become optical white noise – a flurry of input reminiscent of the media's perpetual besiegement of information. Additionally, Salavon will also present a stimulating new real-time video work indicative of mass viewership's gluttony. Drawing upon the Internet's constant feed of current trending topics, Salavon's software generates a graphic cacophony of images and text related to contemporaneous cyber search keywords, tags, posts, and news items. Like a frenzied collage, topical pictures and words coalesce into a collective stream of consciousness – making the work's content definitively ephemeral at any given second. In a modernized vernacular rooted in Sol Lewitt and Robert Rauschenberg's oeuvres, Salavon's works stage a social intervention through self-referential visualization, and create an intricate narrative of control, authority, demand, and subversion.

Born in 1970 in Indianapolis, Salavon obtained his MFA from Art Institute Chicago (IL). He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Columbus, Washington D.C. Houston, Seattle, Cologne, Seoul, London, Geneva, Basel and Paris, among others. Salavon's work has been acquired by the public collections of the International Center of Photography (NY), Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Museum of Fine Arts (TX), Museum of Contemporary Art (IL), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Columbus Museum of Art (OH) and others. Salavon lives and works in Chicago, IL.

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Stephanie Washburn
Twice Told

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce "Twice Told," the gallery's inaugural solo show by emerging artist Stephanie Washburn. Featuring photographs from “Reception” – a series of "television drawings" - her work explores the persistence of human touch in relationship to pictorial flatness, and the resulting interface between painterly and digitally mediated images.

With references to Abstract Expressionism, feminist art practice and early performance, Washburn coalesces real and fictive states through the interplay between televised imagery and ordinary household items. Repurposing the programmed content as passive backdrop, chance encounter, or found object, her materials assume an unlikely focal authority. Materials such as butter, pillow stuffing, and cling wrap fuse with the broadcasted picture plane, the gestural application of which forges an array of abstraction and counter narratives. By manipulating the variables of exposure time, scale, orientation and cropping, her imagery distances the viewer from the original referents, culminating in a tension between the ideas of a photograph as artifact and construct. At times celebratory, destructive, and humorous, Washburn's luminescent displays advocate for agency in perception, both through the staged nature of photography and her experimentation with the theatricality and malleability of the painting process. In a post-industrial and increasingly digital world, Washburn returns us to fraught politics of the body – each work driven forward through the lingering sensation of the artist's touch.

Washburn received her MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work has been exhibited at The University Art Museum (CA), Atkinson Gallery (CA), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (CA), Eagle Rock Center for the Arts (CA), Los Angeles Municipal Gallery (CA) and Davidson Art Center (CT). She currently lives and works between Ojai and Los Angeles.

Image: Stephanie Washburn

Opening Reception: April 14th, 6-8pm

Mark Moore Gallery
5790 Washington Blvd. Culver City
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11-6, and by appointment daily
Admission free

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