NYAB Event - Amos Poe "Robots"

Amos Poe "Robots"

Microscope Gallery

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ROBOTS marks Poe’s painting debut and is also the first time the artist – whose early film works were most recently featured at “Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969-1989” at the New Museum – has exhibited his artworks in the United States. The black and white acrylic paintings were inspired by a week of strangely provoking robot dreams and Poe's resulting reflections on intelligent technology.

In this series of works, the robots evolve across the canvases, some appearing as formal abstractions composed of geometrical shapes, while others acquire more figurative elements and sometimes overtly human characteristics and sexual traits. The robot figures are presented as full-body portraits, purposefully situated within their rectangular canvases, with the constraints occasionally used to amusing effect.

The varied configurations and dimensions combined with Poe’s use of solely gray scale pigments – the palette of early photography and moving image and also the artist’s first mediums – effectively ground the robots in a space traversing historical fact and the world of speculation and fantasy, making it unclear whether the robots are from the past, of the future, or cross generations and time.

“Decades, if not a century, of Sci-Fi prophesies that the future will include a stage of evolution in which humans become extinct because they are incapable of surviving their own entropy, and in their place cyborgs, humanoids and eventually full-fledged robots – all offspring of human intellect – will survive, thrive and "procreate"... if and when this era emerges, what traits and features, if any, will resemble robots' maternal and paternal humans?... are they and will they continue to be masculine? feminine? or neutral?" – AP

AMOS POE is a filmmaker, writer, producer, and artist. Poe is a leading figure of the No Wave Cinema movement (1975-85) that emerged from the East Village music and art scene and included Jim Jarmusch, Abel Ferrara, Vivienne Dick, James Nares, John Lurie, Charlie Ahearn and others. His 1976 collaboration with Ivan Kral THE BLANK GENERATION chronicled the seminal performances of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Blondie, Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, Wayne County, etc. Other noted works of the time include Poe’s UNMADE BEDS (1976), an homage to Godard's "Breathless" and the French New Wave, and THE FOREIGNER (1978), starring Eric Mitchell, Patti Astor, Duncan Hannah and Debbie Harry. Poe’s most recent work, “A Walk in the Park” opened the 2012 Rome International Film Festival and debuted at Landmark Sunshine Cinema in NYC. Poe’s films regularly screen in the US and abroad including at institutions such as The New Museum, MoMA, The Whitney Museum, Anthology Film Archives, MoCA, and the Pompidou Center in Paris among others. An archive of Poe’s writings and other works is housed at The Fales Library in New York. Poe was born in Tel Aviv, in 1949 and emigrated to the US with his family in 1958. He currently lives and works in New York City.