Guy Ambrosino
Helen Dennis
David A. Faust
Christina Gundersen
Jessica Mein
Molly Springfield
Cody Trepte
Amidst recent preoccupations with new media, performative practice and media super-saturation, it might seem that the place of the artist's hand has been eviscerated, digitized into invisibility. These 7 artists directly and indirectly address the loss precipitated by technological advancement.
January 11th, 2007, Williamsburg, Brooklyn,
NY - At Arms Length, curated by Lauren Schell
Dickens and Julie McKim, opens at NURTUREart
Gallery at 910 Grand Street in Williamsburg
on January 11th; Featured Artists in the
exhibition include: Guy Ambrosino, Helen
Dennis, David A. Faust, Christina Gundersen,
Jessica Mein, Molly Springfield, and Cody
Trepte.
Amidst recent preoccupations with new media,
post-studio practice, unmonumentality,
performative practice and media
super-saturation, it might seem that the
place of the artist's hand has been
eviscerated, digitized into invisibility.
With laborious and time-consuming manual
processes performed over and over, the
artists of At Arms Length obsessively attempt
to bring experience back within arm's reach.
These seven artists directly and indirectly
address the loss precipitated by
technological advancement. Through laborious
and sometimes obsessive actions, they
reinsert the hand into artistic production,
in an attempt to combat the alienation
inherent in contemporary life.
Guy Ambrosino's, watercolors, based on the
snapshots by American soldiers of Abu Ghraib
prisoners, omit the photographs' central
figures, leaving a setting only identifiable
by caption. By methodically hand-tracing and
painting these pervasive images, Ambrosino's
process is a personal meditation on the
possibility of familiarizing a distant event.
Molly Springfield laboriously hand-copies
Xeroxed pages of theoretical texts, ink
smears and all. Her meticulous drawings
belabor the futility of manual reproduction,
addressing the relationship between text and
image, while grappling with issues of
reproduction and originality, technology and
labor, digital and analog, pencil and print.
Cody Trepte manually executes binary
code-the
universal language of computers-to explore
the differences between human and
technological expression. His video This is
how I cope with my neuroses is a literal
translation of its title into binary code,
which Trepte then communicates through blinking.
The uncanny snapshot aesthetic of David A.
Faust's photorealistic oil paintings evoke a
subtle disquiet embedded in the American
psychic landscape. By alluding to
photography through themes of light,
reflection and transparency, Faust reveals
alienation as endemic to the banal scenes of
everyday.
Christina Gundersen's series Fallen,
based on
both found images and original photographs,
is an investigation of control articulated in
the moment a horse stumbles and falls. By
obsessively painting the suspended moment of
mid-fall, Gundersen re-inserts the painterly
hand into an otherwise photographic moment,
pushing the documentary abilities of painting.
Helen Dennis combines drawing and
photographic processes to create
architectural images she calls "photographic
drawings". By layering several drawings on
top of photographic paper and exposing them
to light, Dennis unites a variety of
hand-rendered perspectives with a
photographic process. The resulting hybrid
medium temporally references both the
instantaneity of photography and the duration
of drawing.
Jessica Mein's work explores the tension
between the mediated space of film, and the
physicality of drawing. In a cyclical
process that emphasizes the entwining of
these two mediums, the expanded frame of
video is both a means for "sketching" her
drawings and a surface for their execution.
Reception: Friday, Jan. 11th, 7 - 9 p.m.
Press Preview 6-7pm
New Nurture Art Gallery
910 Grand Street, East Williamsburg - Brooklyn
Open to the public on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from noon to 6 p.m., and by appointment
Free admission