Lincoln Tobier " SCREWED to the Wall"
Martos Gallery
This event has ended.
"Lincoln Tobier's current work can be seen through a process of building, collapsing, and reassembling an illusion of 'form.' This exhibition will include works of photography, painting and sculpture.
La Machine, the painted aluminum sculpture that has provided the central iconic motif for his work in the last few years, was developed out of a process where a single sheet of paper is cut and folded into a standing three-dimensional structure, while retaining the connotations of its origin in a two-dimensional plane. Resembling a creature with legs that had been cut away from its circular monad shape and dropped to touch the ground, and four semi-submerged heads (of public figures from the print media chosen for their affect-less gaze) that had been folded to pop up from its center to stare in unison at a single direction, La Machine has been described by Tobier as a 'hydra-golem—an omnivorous, continually self-rebooting artificial meta-organism, a stand-in for the over-lapping drives of the governmental/military/media/corporate/entertainment multiplex.'
The first 'pictures' Tobier made to accompany the exhibition of La Machine in 2004 were in effect mirror/paintings 'made for the sculpture,' turning it into a spectator of its own narrative as a machine/body beyond itself in the world. This current exhibition continues this trajectory of creating a set of pictures that is also 'an open film,' an expanded cinema where each picture, in addition to possessing its own form to hold an image as a painting, also functions like a film frame, where scale shifts (Sadr City Rollers and Jump Cut) incorporate the language of montage to suggest diegetic traversals through a spatial suture.
As such, the making of these paintings, growing out of the logic of the transposition of one medium onto another, is a meditation on a procedure of transformation—a discourse on medium. Shifting from manipulated photographic images on paper to folded sheets of metal, to a filmic installation of paintings relocated onto the same aluminum planes as the sculpture from which it was derived, the material support for these pictures trace a structure where a medium acts on the pre-existing set of information (e.g. the figure of La Machine; its status in two, then three, dimensions; its physical fact and subsequent meta-physical launch into pictorial narrative), and then re-creates the information into a new form. The painted metal holds the planes as sculptural objects as well as painted surface; the depth that is conveyed by chroma speaks of both the rhyming of scenes in frames from a film, as well as the absorption of painting.
If this body of work speaks, finally, as group of paintings, then perhaps one can understand the bodily emplacement of the viewer in the exhibition as being implicated—maybe as a character, even—in a network of 'mirrorical returns.' Pictured as 'signs,' the paintings' flatness resonate with the unidirectional faces of the hydra-golem, which, though set in mises en scène, are nonetheless, still, flat. Sometimes contemplating themselves in mirrors where the backs of their blank heads stand in for the subject as spectator; sometimes following a grammar of capital, where a foreshortening and flattening of the political into image is further distorted into its anamorphic skull."
Known for projects in sculpture, radio, and installation, Lincoln Tobier has exhibited works in museums and galleries in the US, Europe, and Japan including the Venice Biennale and LACMA. In 2008 Tobier was featured in Index: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Collection at MoCA, Los Angeles. A native New Yorker, Lincoln Tobier has been based in Los Angeles since 2000.
Media
Schedule
from December 11, 2009 to January 30, 2010
Opening Reception on 2009-12-11 from 18:00 to 20:00