NYAB Event - Jesse Hlebo "Still, Life Pt.2: Fabricated Authenticity"

Jesse Hlebo "Still, Life Pt.2: Fabricated Authenticity"

Printed Matter, Inc.

This event has ended.

This exhibition of original and newly created artworks echoes many of Hlebo’s concerns as a maker of artists’ books, which he produces under his publishing initiative Swill Children. Exploring questions of impermanence, value and hierarchy, the body of work represents both an effort in extraordinary production—in one case a stack of 13,500 Risograph prints—as well as the concertedly unique, as with the three screen print reproductions of blown-up dust particles in "Not Nothing," for which all digital and physical traces have since been destroyed. Other works are similarly formed and articulated through a process of destruction; negatives are damaged and distressed, paper is punctured, print runs exhaust their ink.

For "Cheltenham," Hlebo has created three hand-bound books of paper run through a Risograph machine and then violently stabbed. The work uses The New York Times’ headline typeface and has the word ‘FACTUALITY’ printed over every page, a gesture to suggest what comes to us as ‘truth’ is a thing in need of reforming and perhaps even destroying. The books rest on three issues of The New York Times (January 6th, 2011) that have been trimmed vertically to the edge of the title.

In "Stack of Glass" Hlebo responds directly to the space at hand, arranging four bookstore vitrines to surround a towering pile of Risograph prints. Measuring 56”, the stack emerges over the enclosure. One vitrine has been left slightly off axis, allowing partial entrance to the prints, creating a situation where participants can step in but only with an uncomfortable and precarious effort. The prints in the stack echo the image in the storefront window display, showing a reproduction of a punched-out LCD screen, resembling fractures through ice or splashing water.

"My All" consists of an editioned set of USB drives containing high-resolution digital images of Hlebo’s work and writings. The USB drives are available for a donation, as though to undermine the possibility of authenticity in the other works. The owner is invited to use the files in any manner they see fit.

Jesse Hlebo is an artist, editor and publisher living in Brooklyn. He is the founder of Swill Children, an umbrella initiative started in 2009 for various publishing projects, audio objects (records, cassettes and small run CD's), as well as Party Lab, _ Quarterly and Commonism. The idea of value as a variable substance is the project’s fundamental concept.

Media

• Prints
• Other
• Sculpture

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