Alexander Massouras “Machines of Loving Grace”
David Krut Projects
This event has ended.
The exhibition’s title comes from Richard Brautigan’s poem of the 1960s, in which he imagines a “cybernetic ecology” created through the union of nature and technology. “Machines of loving grace” — the poem’s final line — captures the utopian paradox of this post -‐ industrial yet pre -‐ lapsarian state of leisure. In Machines of Loving Grace, Massouras recaptures that paradox through form and process. The series Nine Flare Paintings with Octagonal Aperture represent s a fusion of the natural with the man -‐ made: images of the sun’s flare on a camera lens, they are distorted exercises in both photorealism and landscape. In these paintings, Massouras overstates the camera’s agency by painting in constructed octagonal flare, introducing mechanical, straight edges to natural imagery of sun falling on treetops. Technology and abstraction become constitutive of the pastoral idyll. These complicated relationships between imagery and form, technology and process, and abstraction and figuration, are recurring themes in Massouras’s work. Since camera flare is a distinctly photographic subject, its rendering in painterly marks creates a mismatch between form and subject, a paradox also central to Polaroid Etchings. In this series, Massouras translates intaglio printmaking into the format of Polaroid 600 instant film. These works again fuse photographic images with manual process, but this time the relationship of technological reproducibility and natural singularity is inverted: it is the hand -‐ made etching that has the capacity for duplication; the machine -‐ made Polaroid is unique.
Media
Schedule
from March 05, 2015 to April 02, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-03-05 from 18:00 to 20:00