NYAB Event - “Signal to Noise” Exhibition

“Signal to Noise” Exhibition

Simon Preston Gallery

This event has ended.

Simon Preston Gallery presents Signal to Noise, a group exhibition including works by Zarouhie Abdalian, Shannon Ebner, Leslie Hewitt, Iman Issa and André Komatsu.

A signal is typically an innovation or disruption that has the potential to grow in scale and distribution. Incorporated into contemporary systems, signals can complicate issues such as the construction, deconstruction, editing or reaffirmation of language. In this instance, the signal to noise ratio is an attempt to detect and quantify essential information amongst the white-noise of interference.

Zarouhie Abdalian traverses ideas of invisibility, time and space, using slight gestures to instigate shifts in perception of a given location or social landscape. Often employing sound as material, in Buoy, the artist deconstructs a whistle, placing its components in a glass of water, and in Every Instance (D#/E♭), reconfigures piano keys, silencing each into sculptural form.

Shannon Ebner investigates the correlations between photography, sculpture and language. Informed by various modes of writing, from poetry to political speech, and black and white image-making, Ebner excavates letters and phrases from vernacular materials calling attention to the ways language and imagery are constructed.

Leslie Hewitt presents an arrangement of personally and politically charged materials that conjure associative meaning through juxtaposition. In her series Riffs on Real Time, Hewitt investigates the formation of cultural memory through the combination of three-dimensional objects and layered found photographic imagery.

Iman Issa uses conventional museological displays such as plinths, captions and vinyl text to create a framework for objects that attempt to underscore alternative political histories. Her Heritage Studies series explores the way in which historical objects resonate with, and are witnessed in the present, by re-interpreting objects from the past as newly imagined forms.

André Komatsu’s sculptural practice adopts the detritus of modernity and exploits the politics of materiality. In Contra Rega 3 / Counter-rule 3 and the series Educação básica / Basic Education, Komatsu uses everyday building materials, plastic bags, iron-nails and cord, and rearranges them into clean minimal geometric compositions. Altering the original function and creating a contradiction in form, Komatsu proposes a destabilization of constructs of value, power and economics.