poster for Chris Bors “American Jesus”

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Art During the Occupation Gallery, Bushwick presents “American Jesus,” our first solo exhibition of the work of Chris Bors. This painting solo is titled after the Bad Religion song and presents new paintings using bold graphics and text commenting on our current political climate, commodification, trash culture, and personal obsessions.

Often using the template from children’s Paint with Water activity books, Bors incorporates drips of color to activate the surface and create a jarring contrast, while referencing stain paintings of the 1950s and 60s. Several acrylic on denim works includes hand-made buttons, reminiscent of heavy metal and punk jean jackets. Bors also paints the circles and drips alone, focusing on the materiality of paint itself while arriving at minimal abstraction via pop culture.

Meticulously painted to resemble silkscreen prints, political messaging, or t-shirt graphics, Bors’s paintings incorporate a mash-up of images in which any visuals are fair game for repurposing. In Poison Idea, 2018, for example, he combines repeated images of the Major League Baseball team mascot the Phillie Phanatic with the flag of Isis and the logo for the hardcore punk band Poison Idea. His appropriation of hardcore punk band logos plays on the confrontation of violence and solidarity as seen in a music genre with roots based on a struggle for social justice.

Having attended hundreds of hardcore punk concerts over the years, as well as promoting them himself, Bors has used his knowledge and appreciation of this subculture and its participants to magnify its inherent contradictions that mirror society at large.

Chris Bors was born in Ithaca, New York and received his MFA from School of Visual Arts. He coined the term “virtual dumpster diving” to describe the practice of taking images and videos from the web. He had a solo show at Randall Scott Projects in Washington, D.C. and has also exhibited at PS1 MoMA, White Columns, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Tillou Fine Art in New York, Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg, Bahnwarterhaus in Esslingen, Germany and Bongoüt in Berlin. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Time Out New York, the Brooklyn Rail and featured in Vogue Italia, K48 and zingmagazine. Residencies include Artist in the Marketplace at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space, Aljira’s Emerge, DNA Artist Residency and Guttenberg Arts.

Media

Schedule

from May 04, 2018 to May 27, 2018

Artist(s)

Chris Bors

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