Keith Sanborn and Brian Dunn “Energy of Delusion / Giant 45”
ventana244
This event has ended.
Ventana244 opens the season with new projects by Keith Sanborn and Brian Dunn. Sanborn and Dunn manipulate their respective media bringing about re-readings and mis-readings of a world in which visual information floods everyday lives. In this context, Sanborn presents a large selection of films each condensed into a single minute while Dunn recreates familiar domestic goods in paint and sculpted sheet-steel.
Sanborn’s Energy of Delusion presents a subjective and compressed museum of cinema, consisting of some of the most notoriously engaging, difficult, and lengthy works in film history, each reduced to a minute. The project varies from 1 to 50 film elements, which play back in random order on several screens. After each film is compressed, a title is added, in the form of a pseudo-algebraic expression: an encrypted form of the title of the original film over the length of the original film in minutes. A credit at the end of each film encrypts the name of the author of the original film over a formula for the reauthoring of the piece. This tongue-in-cheek notation is a nod to Flaubert, who speculated that the art of the future might occupy a place midway between algebra and music. The effects of these procedures of selection and compression seem to vary with each viewer: from abrupt repulsion, to frenetic fascination, to the ecstatic grasp of a vast sweep of time in a single instant.
In Giant 45, Dunn presents low-relief paintings of bath towels, 12” record sleeves, and blue plastic tarpaulins. These items, Dunn’s referents, require physical manipulation and might seem to have a history of human use. In their objecthood, human scale, and facture, they are rooted in the physical. But, emptied of their functional use-value, situated in a specific optical depth of field and refigured as “Painting”, Dunn’s “commercial goods” mirror archetypes of modernist abstraction. In his own particular formalist attention to the world, Dunn’s project flattens, abstracts and approximates its referents. The works give attention to the banal and insignificant yet they collapse the relationships these items might have to us.
Together these two projects are situated in a time when global events are known as they happen. Information is endlessly updated every moment of the day and encyclopedic knowledge seems to constantly double. The information universe closes in on every moment of our lives. As a result, compression and the ability to instantly transmit large amounts of information becomes one of the most pressing factors of daily life. Sanborn and Dunn let us think about the music of the rush to rush and our obsession to amass so much stuff.
Media
Schedule
from September 11, 2015 to October 04, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-09-11 from 19:00 to 21:00