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17/1/2012

Gareth Long

Michael Benevento, Los Angeles

Michael Benevento is pleased to announce Roman Copies & Copié Romans, the West Coast solo debut of New York based artist Gareth Long. The exhibition will run from January 18, to February 25, 2012, with an opening reception from 6 to 8 pm and will feature two new lenticular prints and a body of drawings from an ongoing series.

Informed by a practice concerned with reading, re-reading and misreading, Literary Asses is a suite of paperback-sized drawings copied by the artist from illustrations of famous donkeys in literature: Aesop, Lucian, Apuleius, Cervantes, Orwell, Stevenson (and others). Each of the drawings is executed in gold-fold stamping. Complicating Long’s investigation of the donkey as a literary agent of transformation and error, Literary Asses expands the artist’s historical investigation of the animal through issues of amateurism and mimicry, stupidity and intelligence, laziness and labor, folly and failure. This iteration of Literary Asses will feature ten pieces from the series, a body of work that will figure into a forthcoming play of the same name.

Two new lenticular prints featuring variations on Venn diagrams overlaid with diptych images relating to sculptural and theatrical traditions of Ancient Greece and recurrent motifs of the artist’s practice are also on display. While Plato famously dismissed the notion of imitation in favor of singularity and the “idea,” recently this hierarchy has been reversed; in Long's work the notion of copying becomes both the primary subject and mode of production.

In the Aristotelian view, copying was understood to be integral to notions of learning and education. This leads to the motif of the Venn diagram, which introduces a second element to the work: knowledge, a subject that, in Western terms, is inextricably bound to the historical and geographic area of Ancient Greece. The circling shapes of the diagrams seem to suggest a boundary to what we can know or learn – the word ‘enkuklos,’ or encirclement, links etymologically to the word ‘encyclopedia.’ A blank Venn diagram suggests an incomplete or limited form of knowledge, just as copying suggests a form of ongoing seriality that resists final completion.

Lenticular technology further exemplifies notions of limitation and instability in material and formal terms. The circular diagrams move and shift as the viewer walks past the prints. Presented in pairs opposite one other, they form two halves of an incomplete circle. The notion of the theatrical lies not only in the content of the works, but also in their formal and physical qualities. The prints surround their audiences, forming a theatre prop of sorts that is both spectacle and stage, a material that invites viewing, but also demands that spectators become actors. An object that demands visitors move around it in a quasi performative mode of participation.The subject of imitation in theatre was also at the centre of philosophical debates in the ancient world. Long takes these debates into the present day; the perfectly circular forms of the Ancient Greek amphitheatre mirror the diagrams used in modern-day theories of logic.

Gareth Long was born in Toronto, Canada. He holds a BA in Visual Studies and Classical Civilizations from the University of Toronto and an MFA from Yale University. Long has held solo exhibitions at Oakville Galleries, Toronto; Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto, The Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; The Apartment, Vancouver, Kate Werble Gallery, New York; and TORRI, Paris. His work has been shown at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal; Montreal; Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto; Flat Time House, London; Wiels, Brussels; University of Tasmania, Hobart; Artists Space, New York; Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York; and MoMA PS1.

Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 18, 6-8pm

Michael Benevento
7578 Sunset Blvd. - Los Angeles
Gallery hours are 10-5pm, Tuesday through Saturday
Free admission

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