Chris Finley "Power Sources"
Jane Lombard Gallery
This event has ended.
2008: The United States of America finds itself in a year of momentous presidential campaigns, a challenging time marked by pointed political debates. Tapping on the current situation, Chris Finley’s recent works focus on the media saturated coverage of the impending election, inventing a portrait gallery of US political leaders for his premiere show at Lombard-Freid Projects.
Finley’s seemingly non-referential, highly elegant abstract paintings combine pop cultural imagery with art historical sources that nod to futurist and constructivist artists from Giacomo Balla to Naum Gabo.
Each of his works begins with a figurative picture—typically downloaded from the Internet—of a popular icon (American politicians are the protagonists of this show) which is then submitted through a series of digital manipulations –distortions, stretching, rotations—until it becomes unrecognizable as a figural likeness, completely divorced from its source. Finley painstakingly reworks each individual line, masking, cutting and painting it onto the canvas.
His intense image processing technique calls into question the reliability of images culled from the media to communicate stable meanings. A subtle commentator of an ever-expanding 21st century world of information, the artist notes: “It is my desire to create alternative visual outcomes whose formal elements are derived from pervasive media-based narratives.”
The paintings in Power Sources draw their titles either from their subjects such as politicians Hillary, Rove, Schummer, and Obama, or from the headline news captions The Hearing (referring to the attorney general Alberto Gonzales) or The Resigned (referring to a group of political figures who resigned from their positions such as Ashcroft, Bolton, Powell, Rumsfeld and Tenant).
Media
Schedule
from May 22, 2008 to June 21, 2008
Opening Reception : May 22, 6-8 pm.