Allen Grubesic "Concept"

Judith Charles Gallery

poster for Allen Grubesic "Concept"

This event has ended.

Allen Grubesic's art counters our general tendency to pre-read and mythologize our everyday encounters by exposing the frailness of our own systems of knowledge. Drawing inspiration from the vernacular and particularly from the constant barrage of the mainstream media, Allen Grubesic's work investigates semiotics, the study of words and signs, which produce meaning and myth out of thin air.
We constantly read everything around us whether explicit text or simply common visual cues. It's content is absorbed and unconsciously categorized and put into systems which fit the way we each, individually, interpret the world. Through repetition, experience and context we assign value and placement to what we have read so that it fits into a wider landscape of meaning. In a sense we mythologize everything around us by going beyond the explicit concepts, ideas, messages and forms in order to create a mode of communication existing outside conventional language.
'Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way it utters this message...Everything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this, for the universe is infinitely fertile in suggestions' - Roland Barthes, Mythologies.
Our ability and urge to constantly draw connections between words and familiar images also continually produces myths in new ways. That said, we also most we often simply rely on classifying things into pre-existing systems - Grubesic plays on this intellectual laziness by challenging and playing with our preconceived notions. This is achieved by juxtaposing form and content as he does in Painting or leaving the intellectual work up the viewer in Concept by simply stating the underlying mechanism behind the art. Similarly he reverses both our expectation and counters the very notion of what abstract art consists of in Abstract Painting.
Grubesic also takes our celebrity obsessions to task, particular those involving personal demise, as seen in his Lindsay Lohan based work. A similar notion is pushed even further in Transfiguration, depicting the gradual disintegration of reputation of Anders Högström, the young man who ordered the theft of the Auschwitz-Birkenau 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign in 2009.
Ultimately, Grubesic goes full circle in Conspiracy Theory, a 20 panel piece, playing on the obsessive nature of our fears combined with our affinity to connect otherwise separate events, agencies and locations in order for them to fit into systems of our own creation. The acronyms are themselves words reduced to a minimum which have, in turn, become endowed with greater meaning and mystery through the of the media, highlighting their ambiguous and volatile force. By using similar strategies to the pop artists of easily recognizable signifiers, words and imagery these pieces also highlight the tendency to make myths in order to rationalize what cannot be rationalized.
Ultimately we are forced to accept the inherent instability of the systems we use to decipher and make sense of our surroundings through Grubesic's intelligent manipulation of our preconceptions as well as our inherent desire to manage and pretend to understand a world beyond our full comprehension.
[Image: Allen Grubesic "Untitled" 2011]

Media

Schedule

from April 07, 2011 to May 06, 2011

Opening Reception on 2011-04-07 from 18:00 to 21:00

Artist(s)

Allen Grubesic

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