Gary Carsley "fiction_non_fiction"
Margaret Thatcher Projects
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In an immersive, unashamedly beautiful work that pays playful homage to Gilbert & George’s 1973 sylvan masterpiece “The Shrubberies”, the Australian artist Gary Carsley modestly provides a chair in Chelsea upon which one can simultaneously be “with” and “in” art. Contrasting the international pictorial vocabulary of the Chinese Garden with that of another international system of signification – IKEA furniture, sections of D.95 Synthetic Landscape Number 1* are being shown concurrently in New York and Shanghai. At Margaret Thatcher Projects the image seamlessly mashes together the 21st century Chinese Scholars Garden on Staten Island with the 400-year-old Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai. fiction_non_fiction gently cajoles the viewer into trying to distinguish between the real and the copy. Above all it asks if terms like “original” and “authentic” have any residual validity, and if so what cultural and material value can be attributed to them, by whom, in what context and when.
In a technical process Carsley clarifies with the term Karaoke’ing, the Photograph, the artist slyly displaces photography’s indexical authority with a palette of scanned in faux wood grain contact adhesive papers, of the type used domestically in homes all over the world. Similarly, the artist often uses furniture as a substrate for his work, while referencing popular entertainment activities such as drag and karaoke, not literally as actions but as modes of translation and by extension critical and creative authorship.
Media
Schedule
from January 29, 2010 to February 27, 2010