NYAB Event - Christian Faur "The Land Surveyors"

Christian Faur "The Land Surveyors"

Kim Foster Gallery

This event has ended.

Kim Foster Gallery presents The Land Surveyors, Christian Faur's first solo show in New York City. Using an intricate digital mapping technique, Faur deconstructs imagery down to pixels. This information is used to hand-cast crayons into precise tones and colors. Eventually, thousands of crayons are reassembled into wooden frames to produce an art form that balances the qualities of photography, painting and sculpture. From a distance, the pieces look like highly pixelated images. It is only when the viewer gets closer that they realize that the pixels are crayon tips.

Faur starts out with photographs taken during the Great Depression as a reference to our current economic and social climate. Portraits of anonymous individuals in desolate, empty landscapes make up a gallery of the powerful and the powerless. Inspired by Franz Kafka's novel The Castle where the protagonist seeks to find work as a land-surveyor but gets caught up in the system's bureaucracy, the title of the show serves as a metaphor for the impenetrability of a political system, that enables greed and corruption and leaves the individual at the whim of those in power.

Faur then reconstructs these gray photographs with hundreds of differently colored crayons to give them back the lost color of their time. This idea is to be understood quite literally: although full color in film had been available in the 30's, cost did not permit its use. The economic climate had removed color not only metaphorically from everyday life experiences but also from the aesthetic possibilities of its times.

Media

• Other
• Sculpture

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