NYAB Event - Simon Dybbroe Møller "The Demon of Noontide"

Simon Dybbroe Møller "The Demon of Noontide"

This event has ended.
At Harris Lieberman
Media: Painting, Film, Performance Art

Harris Lieberman presents The Demon of Noontide, the first U.S. solo exhibition of Danish artist Simon Dybbroe Møller. In his latest body of work, Møller addresses the fallacy of progress - particularly as it underlies the avant-gardist paradigm of artistic development and the unrelenting pace of technological advancement. The artist's paintings, performance, and videos signal neither a celebration nor a critique of progress, but rather by foregrounding their conceptual and process-based iterations, introduce a cyclical alternative to this dominant model.

Three films in the back gallery follow the exhibition's recurring character as he engages in mundane tasks like driving a car, working in the office and retrieving an article of clothing from a dry cleaning carousel. In lieu of diegetic audio, a string quartet accompanies these videos by precisely imitating every sound produced by the featured machinery. While bringing to mind a whole array of films either made in celebration or critique of technological progress, this "symphony of machines" instead merely exhibits sensuality within monotony. With unapologetic neutrality, he short videos give us mechanized, fragmented and emptied time.
A new series of paintings span the walls of the main gallery, comprising inkjet prints of photographs of canvas that Møller has applied, with wallpaper paste, to actual canvases. As the paste and water sap colors from the printouts, Møller's brushstrokes gradually appear: functional marks that incidentally double as signs of expressive technique. Here the most commonly used machine for image reproduction - the household printer - becomes a chance producer of images of alchemic qualities.