NYAB Event - Tara Sinn and Rafaël Rozendaal Exhibition

Tara Sinn and Rafaël Rozendaal Exhibition

Spencer Brownstone Gallery

This event has ended.

Spencer Brownstone presents a tandem exhibition featuring the work of Tara Sinn and Rafaël Rozendaal. Winter is a time marked by hostile weather and driven by extremes. Functioning as an immersive environment, this exhibition descends into a realm where the altered psychological state of winter operates as the norm, -the artworks simultaneously reveling and reviling in conflicting symptoms of indulgence and depravation, anxiety and detachment, mania and depression.

First conceived as a web animation (http://www.babydinosaureyes.com/xanax.html), Tara Sinn's XANAX utilizes typography and design tropes to address the limitations of pharmaceutical taxonomy, psychiatric medication, and its greater psychopharmacological concerns. Toying with the construction of the palindrome, Sinn blurs the lines between the austerity of official drug nomenclature and the contemporary nonchalant approach to recreational drug use. This exhibition will feature a new large-scale installation version of XANAX composed of suspended Mylar.
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A full-fledged participatory installation, Rafaël Rozendaal's Broken Self was also originally concocted for the Internet (http://www.brokenself.com/). Using a minimal approach, the site consists of a blank browser window acting as a brittle medium that can be shattered with the mere click of the mouse. Whether interpreted as a release from an overly wired world or attributed to the continual breaking-down of the Self, the effect is one of blissful violence and purgative joy. In the installation version the screen is simply painted onto a concrete wall lit only via a rapid strobe. Participants engage by projecting glass bottles at the painted screen, creating a euphoric crash and a rain of broken glass. On the floor, the shards remain as they fell, accumulating and leaving a shiny residue of the creative destruction.