8/6/2007
Timeline
See Line, Santa Monica
Group show
Group show
Artists: Kathrin Burmester, Chris Oatey, Ami Tallman, Maria Von Kohler
See Line Gallery presents Timeline a group exhibition featuring works by Kathrin Burmester, Chris Oatey, Ami Tallman and Maria Von Köhler.
Kathrin Burmester's digital collages News Compositions are created from a day's worth of online news photographs. By methodically collecting and then compositing the photos, Burmester forms a new image that is notable in its ability to slow down the immediacy of photojournalistic imagery. As the individual photographs blend together they form a new image that is at once an image that collapses its content and an image where unrelated details strangely fall into place. Ultimately, Burmester's collages create an awareness of looking and seeing. She leverages the underlying properties of collage to extend the life of the source images and to facilitate an investigation of the usage of news photography. Her collages ask us to consider the impact of the hyped-up continuous distraction created by the current barrage of images and news stories.
Chris Oatey's drawings are a part his larger investigation entitled "Wallpaper of Champions" which looks at how sports are valued in our culture, in this case through the pairing of athlete and spectator. An image of marathon runners is placed next to an image of a crowd, both recognizably different in content, yet aesthetically similar. It is within this space where Oatey plays on temporality and social culture, carefully constructing each image in a way that allows us to think about our relationship to sports imagery and its ability to seduce us visually.
Ami Tallman draws from many disparate sources for tactical models and visual styles, producing work in groups that represent juxtapose imagery in an array of representational and discursive perspectives. For Tallman's current project, the artist looked at various environments in which semi-clandestine foreign policy decisions were being made, and in this task, came across a slew of English country manors that had been re-purposed as corporate retreats, Their current function held a great similarity to the way the homes had been used when the aristocrats who built them had been in power. Between their initial habitation and their present function, many of these homes fell into disrepair as they lost their male heirs in WWI. In depicting what these interiors looked like in the period between these two identities, Tallman attempts to capture the desolation of an inheritance without recipient, and the strangeness of what seemed like an orphaned private world.
Maria von Köhler's sculptures imitate artificial, degraded replicas either through the objects themselves or the positions they take within the space. As monuments they service a homogenized heroic ideology that functions merely as a mechanism of propaganda, forming the basis of the relationship between the works both inside and outside of the gallery. The multiples evoke a kind of metonymic sliding of signification, reinforcing a relationship of ambivalence between the viewer and the heavily determined subject matter. In this, the politics of visuality and a fraught culture industry arise in repetitive dissonance, seeking to chronologize an ambiguous conflicted-ness of commodity desire.
See Line
1812 Berkeley Street - Santa Monica