Ilja Karilampi “Xxxercise”
The Suzanne Geiss Company
This event has ended.
Xxxercise is a continuous tone like the London radio station Rinse.fm, or a plainclothes cop working the field, sleepless from solving a case of unorthodox character. Riffing on decades of VIP lifestyle and the sculptural club life of New York since the 70s, Xxxcercise is a purgatory space; an aesthetic environment trapped between studio and nightclub. It is an exhibition without a start and stop - both an artwork and the site from which it emerges.
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Lining the main gallery and entryway are a series of wall works and posters. The aluminum armatures of the hanging sculptures are outfitted with laser cut plexiglas and custom vinyl decals, layering fields of logotype, brand icons and the artist’s own drawings. In their excessive mash up of symbols and referents, these curated works mingle and steep, conscious of their idiosyncratic, uncanny nature. In concert with each other, the icons at play drift from pop culture, beckoning the question: to whom do these symbols belong? Contending with self portraiture, Ilja Karilampi’s reflexive practice folds past projects into the evolving current of subculture imagery, building the artist’s lexicon as he takes on new icons and subjects.
Xxxercise at The Suzanne Geiss Company explores the conflation of process and product present throughout Karilampi’s work. In advance of the opening and during the course of the show, Karilampi will invite collaborators to engage with the space and its contents, leaving behind their respective marks and ephemera as contribution to the collective mass that is Xxxercise.Xxxercise looks to activate a complicit audience, unsure if the party is over of just getting started. Ecstatic as Dutch teenage stadium house producer Martin Garrix on a peak time drop.
Ilja Karilampi was born in 1983 in Göteborg, Sweden. Karilampi’s output follows narrative & performative paths to transform, dissect, and create layered myths from a mixture of original and constructed content. In 2011, Karilampi was part of a residency on Governors Island, where he created a daytime nightclub installation “Governors Club”. In 2012, he exhibited the video piece “The Chief Architect of Gangsta Rap” at MoMA PS1 in a domestic setting resembling a living room. Recent solo exhibitions include “President Room” at CO2, Torino, “SweSh Xpress” at Marbriers 4, Geneva, “JAG ÄR” at Gallery Niklas Belenius, Stockholm, and “new RELEASES” an upcoming show
at Sandy Brown, Berlin. He currently lives and works in Berlin.
Media
Schedule
from September 04, 2014 to October 18, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-09-04 from 18:00 to 20:00