Luis Jacob "Without Persons"
Art in General
This event has ended.
Art in General presents Without Persons, an exhibition, of new and recent works by Toronto-based artist Luis Jacob, including video, painting, and a new work from the artist’s Album series. Receiving increasingly wider recognition, Jacob’s work was first exhibited at Art in General as part of the group exhibition Explosion LTTR: Practice More Failure, in 2004. More recently, Jacob’s work has been included in Documenta 12 and has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Kunstverein, Hamburg; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
The artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., Luis Jacob: Without Persons features a series of works that explore absence and authenticity in terms of pictorial representation, the legacy of modern art, and the self and others. These works call on the viewer to consider what may lie beneath the surface of the “empty picture,” and what new forms of real and unconscious knowledge may lay dormant in such minimal propositions.
The central installation, “Without Persons,” for which the exhibition is titled, is an immersive multimedia work that features two computer-generated voices, one male and one female, that talk about “being-in-the-city” and “being-with-others.” The adjacent images project an amorphous, plasma-like liquid, with abstract but seemingly bodily movement, as if animated by the artificial voices. As the liquid finds new forms in formlessness, the voices invite the viewer to consider the discord of the alien world without persons, and the coming to consciousness of an infant who knows no persons.
Jacob’s engagement with abstraction is also reflected in the exhibition through a series of paintings the artist made in response to an early suite of Mark Rothko paintings. Considering notions of authenticity and appropriation, Jacob reconstituted the original works using a staining technique on raw canvas for one series, and a vivid tie-dye technique, with two “eye holes” in the accompanying series of paintings.
Media
Schedule
from September 16, 2010 to November 13, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-09-16 from 18:00 to 20:00