Jack Warren "Straight, No Chaser"
Larissa Goldston Gallery
This event has ended.
Larissa Goldston Gallery presents Straight,No Chaser, an exhibition of new work by 2008 AXA Artist Award recipient Jack Warren. The mixed media collages, installation, and video included in this exhibition continue Warren's earlier explorations of language but focus on hisdesire to articulate an understanding of our collective place in the fragmented dystopia of human experience.
A collector of things, Warren sees the world most clearly in its abandoned objects. Using "found" language culled from pages of abandoned books, journals, magazines, historical files, and movies, Warren translates the broken-down content into a visual language of his own. In Burden of Dreams – an installation comprised of ephemera from Warren’s studio – there is a video of the artist reciting a monologue given by Werner Herzog in Les Blank’s documentary of the same name. Shot in several locations throughout his studio, the monologue is meant to be a metaphor for Warren’s ruminations on the state of the ever-changing art market.
His viewpoint is also evident in the individual collages that are nothing short of reconstructions – perhaps imagined reanimations – of fragments left behind, stacks of magazines, piles of printed words, broken totems of our commerce and our religion, images stripped of their context, scraps from the table of a great and troubled feast. What comes through in this work is something both spiritual and tactile, a translation of our most common expressions into a language made up of symbolic glyphs and mathematical formations.
The sense of accumulation in both the installation and the individual collage pieces – an amassing of ideas and their inevitable machines– demonstrates the ever increasing sum total of Warren's understanding of this world. His realignment of its spent energies into landscapes, designs and figurations, imaginings of a world we might have had or, perhaps, of one buried deeply beneath the scorched path we have trampled on our way toward oblivion.
Media
Schedule
from January 09, 2009 to February 21, 2009