"Layer Current" Exhibition

Like the Spice

poster for "Layer Current" Exhibition

This event has ended.

Layering, as a strategy, takes on varying and multiple meanings and uses in each piece, some layers are there to hide or modify what’s beneath, other layers combine to produce startling effects, some layers allude to geological stratifications and accumulations, others mark the slow, painstaking process of their intentional layer-by-layer creation. Collage, décollage, collecting, accreting and composting are all in evidence.

Often labor-intensive and obsessive by design, the works in this exhibition do not aspire to a unified cold glossy surface, seen in so much “Blue Chip” luxury art today, but revel in the handmade humanity of their production. Even the sensual surfaces are here the result of painstaking processes, not mechanized perfection.

Several works take up mundane experience as subject matter, transforming materials, though precise attention to detail and refined technique, into embodiments of the ridiculousness and subtle hidden meanings of the everyday. Other works have their own magical arbitrariness of process, becoming systems for living through work, rather than systems for producing works; the slow buildup of layers making art of slow, incremental, repetitive, obsessive actions that are more process than product, intense accumulations of time in material form.

There is something to this idea of surface upon surface upon surface, which is distinctly of our time. In Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time there is an anecdote, possibly invented, about an old woman who confronts a scientist after his public lecture on astronomy,

"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

When it comes to contemporary society, unlike world-supporting turtles, we get the feeling that perhaps life really is just surface layers, all the way down.

Media

Schedule

from December 08, 2011 to December 18, 2011

Opening Reception on 2011-12-08 from 18:00 to 21:00

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