NYAB Event - Artie Vierkant “Image Objects”

Artie Vierkant “Image Objects”

Mesler/Feuer

This event has ended.

Mesler / Feuer presents Image Objects, Artie Vierkant’s first solo presentation of his series of the same name since 2012.

Image Objects are works that attempt to reflect the mutability of contemporary production methods, existing at the interstice between the physical object and the mediated image. The series is titled for the idea of this divide itself, in a time when our understanding of objects comes equally from our physical interaction with them as well as the contexts and frequency with which we encounter images of those objects, and when representational autonomy can be interrupted with highly commonplace tools for copying, altering, and reclaiming images. As I have written elsewhere, an environment in which ‘everything is anything else’.

The works in this exhibition are conceived to exist not just as physical objects, but instead in three ways: the original file, the fabricated object, and any images of that object. Each piece stems from an initial file that is continually transformed, warped, and re-composed until such point that a composition seems ready to be finalized and fabricated. The moment that the compositions are initially saved becomes the title of each individual work, for example Image Object Tuesday 14 July 2015 11:44AM (Westfälischer), which marks the most recent aesthetic labor done for the exhibition.

Each time Image Objects are officially documented the installation views are altered before their release, whether printed in a publication or distributed online. This process is intended to allow the objects to continue to shift and evolve aesthetically, just as the compositions of the pieces themselves are an ongoing and fluid process. In addition, this is intended to pose an intervention into the space of the installation view itself—the venue of representation—and turn what we are used to thinking of as a ‘mediated’ experience of the work into a direct experience. Here there is no difference between traditional ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ methods of viewing the work, as the installation views become works in their own right, as well as an extension of the embodiment of the fabricated objects on view.

For the first time, the Image Objects in this exhibition also come off the wall, fulfilling the series initial sculptural ambitions—the first statement adjoining the work, for the series’ debut at Reference Gallery in Virginia, suggested that the flat prints attempted to have ‘the depth and presence of a sculpture’. During the course of the exhibition, and until November 20th, another sculptural Image Object is on view as a public sculpture in City Hall Park, New York.

Photography of any of these objects is allowed and encouraged, as in a way the only traditionally ‘representational’ images of these works will become those produced by viewers and published wherever they like.

Artie Vierkant
New York, 2015