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30/5/2008

Charles Gaines

Susanne Vielmetter Berlin Projects, Berlin

Susanne Vielmetter Berlin Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new drawings by Charles Gaines. On view will be new drawings from his “Explosion” and from the “Randomized Text” series. In the larger context of his "Disaster Narratives”, Gaines is interested in critiquing the way we experience art: in particular how we derive meaning and the experience of feeling from it. Gaines’ complex explorations attempt to reveal the political underpinnings of experiencing art by laying bare the linguistic structures that form truth and feeling. By understanding that feeling is produced in art rhetorically, Gaines attempts to show that the truthfulness of any expression is politically realized, that it is more an expression of political belief rather than truth.
Gaines describes the “Explosion” drawings as follows:

“The idea for the Explosion Drawings series came to me after I made the machine-sculpture "Airplanecrashclock" in 1997. That work was a continuous repetition of an airline crash occurring as part of a construction of a downtown city scene. I got the idea of doing the drawings after constructing the crash scene. I noticed that that process of constructing the scene was a lot like painting and drawing. About 5 years later, I did two large drawings, “Airplanecrash 1 and 2”, where I first developed the technique for realizing the image of an explosion using graphite. These drawings were scenes of plane crashes at the point of impact, and the resultant explosions. I continued with this in another series in 2005 called “Airplanecrash Drawings” which included stylized graphite renderings of the explosions separated from the scene of an accident. The present series, "Explosion Drawings" was realized by focusing on the explosion itself without reference to a specific event or accident. My interest in the social context of the accident remained, and in response, I realized the "appendix", a text that accompanies the drawing”. In the “appendix”, “the text merges two to three separate texts that speak to an event in political history and the description of things that causes explosions such as bombs and missiles. I use the syntactical framework of sentences in order to make the merge seem seamless as the subject switches rather arbitrarily between these two or three subjects, creating the illusion of speaking of a single subject. In “Explosion Drawing #8” on, the appendix is a description of a war of emancipation, usually a narrative describing an anti-colonialist insurgency.

This series is a continuation of what I call "Disaster Narratives" that I began in 1995 with my series "Night/Crimes". The entire enterprise, the "Disaster Narratives”, is interested in critiquing the way we experience art: in particular, the experience of pathos (feeling). This is an attempt to reveal the political underpinnings of artistic representation by advancing feeling as a function of rhetoric, which therefore makes acts of expression strategic and political. In "Explosion Drawings," the political contextualization of the explosion is a clear pastiche of unrelated subjects, webbing the aesthetics of the drawings with political history. The arbitrariness of this conflation I feel is what really underlies the illusion of pathos in representation, thus revealing the rhetorical level of discourse. It is the gap between content and the form of its representation that produces this pathos and sense of reality. Usually, when there is symmetry between form and expression, we are convinced that this is the result of a reality and truthfulness of the discourse and/or the image. But by arbitrarily combining content and expression, I want to show that the truthfulness of any expression is politically realized, that it is an expression of political belief and not truth. This, to me, suggests that content realized by pastiche is not a lie, nor is it truth, it is simply, what Jean Francoîs Lyotard suggests, discourse.” Charles Gaines, 2006


Charles Gaines ‘ work has been featured recently in the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; in a two person exhibition with Edgar Arceneaux at the RedCat Gallery, Los Angeles and at the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, Austria. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Triple Candie, New York; Luckman Fine Art Gallery California State University, Los Angeles; Walter/McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco; Santa Monica Museum, Santa Monica; Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, John Weber Gallery, New York City, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York City, and at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, among others. He has been included in “Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970", Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; in “Fade (1990-Present): African American Artists in Los Angeles”, Luckman Gallery, Cal State LA; “Recherche-entdeckt! Bilderarchive der Unsichtbarkeiten, Sixth Esslingen International Photo Triennial, Galerie der Stadt Esslingen am Neckar, Germany; “Structure of Difference: Painting, Sculpture, and Photography of the Past 50 Years,” Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; “Deep Distance-Die Entfernung der Fotografie”, Kunsthalle Basel; in “More than Meets the Eye: Triennale der Photographie,” Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; "Some Grids: The Grid in Twentieth Century Art," Los Angeles County Museum of Art LACMA; "New Dimensions in Drawing, 1950-1980," Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield; and in the "Whitney Biennial," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Susanne Vielmetter Berlin Projects is located at Holzmarktstrasse 15/18 in Berlin Mitte. From the U/S train stop Jannowitzbrücke turn right and walk approximately 300 meters towards the “Aral” gas station. At the “Aral” gas station turn right towards the galleries which are located in the arched spaces underneath the rail road tracks.

Reception: Saturday, May 31, 6 - 8 pm

Susanne Vielmetter Berlin Projects
Holzmarkstrasse 15-18 - Berlin
Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday from 11 am – 6 pm

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