John Warwicker “Criss-Cross Rhythms Exploding with Happiness”
+81 Gallery NY
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+81 gallery presents Criss-Cross Rhythms Exploding with Happiness, a solo exhibition by acclaimed designer, artist and self-proclaimed amateur, John Warwicker.
Warwicker is most known for his groundbreaking design work including the meta-disciplinary design collective Tomato, the electronic group Underworld, and his individual work ranging from branding strategy for Moderna Museet to installation work at Graphic Passport in Tokyo in 2010.
Elastically translating and migrating from audio to visual, literature to graphic, and action to (temporary) stillness, Warwicker locates himself in the flux of dislocation – everything has rhythm and tempo, continuously streaming in evanescence. Drawing from a long history of experiments in the creative industry and informed by immense archive of references including Joyce, Benjamin, Zeami, Hokusai, and Blake among many others, Warwicker traverses continents and millenniums, fluidity defines Warwicker’s modus operandi.
Verses float, varying in size, and drift in and out of focus in the typographic work Ulysses’ Odyssey. The texts are from three different source materials; Ulysses by James Joyce, Odyssey by Homer, and Wanderer by anonymous. Lifted off of the original contexts and merged into a concurrent field of cacophony, elusive meanings emerge out of the animation of words choreographed by the rhythm of the texts and motion of the gaze. Against the stasis of literature dating back to thousands of years ago, the pieces call for a singular experience of reading performed only in the present with the countless semantic possibilities.
Being severely color-blind, Warwicker is fascinated with the idea of color. In Time|s|pace, the graphic print series resembling color field paintings with geometric shapes and subtle shifts in tones, he investigates the tenuous nature of color. The perception of hue, tint, and shade is absolutely ephemeral, contingent on the place and time, shifting through the particular matrix of atmospherics tied to a given location. Warwicker transcribes the mutations of color palette of the cities into a comparative system of grids.
One Thousand Fathoms Deep is a series of black and white photographs in extreme contrast and rough grainy look. Casually composed, the images encapsulate moments of lives in urban environment as if to resonate with the city’s heartbeat. Ecstatic in its cadence the images work like an onomatopoeia; descriptors rendered emotive, each image is a chamber that expressively echoes the sound of the cities.
Warwicker’s work elicits poetics regardless of the medium, and regardless of its intent – commercial or not – and reveals charged compositions and connections that are at once original and quotidian.
Media
Schedule
from May 08, 2015 to June 21, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-05-08 from 18:00 to 20:00