“Graphic: Of or Relating to Visual Art” Exhibition
gallery nine 5
This event has ended.
gallery nine5 presents Graphic: of or relating to visual art, a group show centered around artists grappling with the new visual form of digital media, for its fall season opener. In engaging new and mid-career artists attempting to materialize the impact of the Internet age on their work and audience, Graphic investigates the nuances of digital mediums and influences, providing a wide range of the contemporary landscape of art, from painting to video to installation.
Rubin415’s Rubin’s Cube, a six-paneled three-dimensional cube, brings the graphic off the flat plane and into the physical space. His background as a street artist enhances and supplants the work: Rubin415’s monumental cube rests on the line between slick production and raw expression. His perfect circles, spray-painted and drawn entirely by hand, are rendered with undoubtedly graphic content: clean edges, muted colors, precise angles.
Ye Hongxing meticulously creates jewel-like mosaics using a collage of stickers on canvas, inspired by the imagery of the mainstream media. Equal parts playful kitsch and honest critique, Hongxing responds to the chaos of her home country China, seeking to create full pictures from the isolated masses of China’s exponentially expanding urban neighborhoods.
Glossy surfaces characterize much of Desire Obtain Cherish’s milieu, clearly evident in the high-finish production of his text bubbles. This latest series moves beyond a simple critique of consumerism and the state of the art market to embody main street’s mode of communication. The artist makes the claim that attainment of value and appeal can transpire within a mobile conversation; the cheeky phrases and hashtags express both disbelief and assessment, all the while perpetuating the familiarity of 21st-century technologies.
With her seminal work, The Locker Plant Projections, Anne Katrine Senstad has fully embraced the effect of videography on her career-long investigation of color. Documenting her site-specific video-installation work, projected on Donald Judd’s Marfa, Texas building, Senstad examines the movement of colors against an archetypal architectural form. Her prior C-print works are engaged alongside the video in new ways, adding to her artistic dictionary.
Inspired by the work of classical landscape painters of the early Renaissance, Jessica Lichtenstein brings together the academic and the fantastically with her digitally-rendered cartoon-infested worlds. Using advanced software to vivify her characters and their “natural” environment, Lichtenstein bridges the work of ancient artists with the very new.
Jeremy Flick mixes his own color to imitate the tones of blown-up pixels on his computer screen. His work represents a dynamic duo of artistry: the subject is the digital image, executed with meticulous attention to detail. The combination of dissecting a pixelated image with the handiwork of mixing oil paint colors creates a stunning effect, both retinal and mental. Viewers recognize the graphic nature of his canvases immediately, while the craftsmanship of his technique settles in slowly.
Color permeates Oona Ratcliffe’s abstract acrylic works, sourced from digital topographies and palettes. Initiated by the vibrant colors of imagined landscapes, Ratcliffe draws upon the sensation of over-stimulation one feels in the center of vast urbanity. Paint is applied to the canvas in layers, ultimately mimicking the constant erasure and overlap of the function of the environment today.
Graphic: of or relating to visual art examines the influence of the digital age on art. Whether through the changing of mediums, as in the prevalence of video art to document concepts, or in the use of new colors that appeared first on a computer screen, artists have responded to the social changes that currently surround us. A new language of shapes and palettes has entered into the artistic dictionary; though their relevance is debatable, their presence is permanent. By presenting this presence without judgment, gallery nine5 continues to manifest its mission to accept and analyze art from all spectrums and angles.
Media
Schedule
from September 18, 2014 to October 29, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-09-20 from 18:00 to 20:00