Lyndon Barrois Jr. “Mirage Collar”

Artists Space

[Image: Film still from Mo’ Money, 1992, Columbia Pictures.]

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Artists Space presents Pittsburgh-based artist Lyndon Barrois Jr.’s first New York institutional solo exhibition Mirage Collar, an interconnected suite of drawings, paintings, installations, and sculptural vignettes which explore instances of forgery, subterfuge, gesture, and magic within the history of film. Working deftly across numerous artistic mediums, Barrois’ work breaks down, reframes, and reconfigures these transitory and at times archetypical moments in cinematic expression to pose critical questions around technique, motivation, and value. His practice engages the materiality of images as reproductions and the complexities of transitioning between two and three dimensions and between movement and stasis.

For his exhibition at Artists Space, Barrois will consider the thin lines within painting that separate creation, conservation, and forgery in relation to cinema’s depictions of cons and misdirections. In doing so, he enacts a “hall of mirrors,” animating these disconnected details, objects, and elements and then re-networking them to both stage and study their practical effects. A central reference is the game Three-card Monte, a persistent form of trickery and close-up street magic appearing throughout the exhibition which, for Barrois, parallels painting and art making in general as a kind of sleight-of-hand—the experience of magic being the point at which conviction overrides logic, an affect of performance that is present in both narrative fiction and static representation.

Lyndon Barrois Jr. is an artist and writer based in Pittsburgh, PA where he is an Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. He is half of LAB:D, with artist Addoley Dzegede, with whom he has collaboratively staged two exhibitions, and co-authored a book of essays (Elleboog, at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2019). Using magazines, advertising, cinema, and vernacular imagery as primary subjects of inquiry, Barrois’ multimedia practice breaks down and re-configures the languages of print, design, and popular culture in order to investigate underlying ideology, ethics, and conceptions of value. Recent solo exhibitions include Others Who Struggle with Nature at Rubber Factory NYC, Vague November at Van Eyck Open 2020, and Zaal 8 at Kasteel Oud Rekem in Belgium, and the two-person exhibition Dreamsickle with Kahlil Robert Irving at 47 Canal. Barrois Jr. received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis (2013), and his BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (2006). He has recently completed residencies at Loghaven in Knoxville, the Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (Netherlands), Fogo Island Arts in Newfoundland, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland.