Sayre Gomez "Slippery"
The Hole
This event has ended.
Sayre Gomez will present his first New York solo show of works at the Hole this November 10th. This L.A.-based conceptual artist will present a body of work consisting predominantly of paintings but including sculpture and installation elements, focusing around his concept of the slippery signification of art and space, where slight formal adjustments produce widely diverse associations and feelings. Gomez is a recent graduate of Cal Arts in Los Angeles who has had recent solo shows at Kavi Gupta in Chicago and Las Cienegas Projects in Los Angeles. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at White Columns, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, The Torrence Art Museum and UC Irvine University Art Museum. He is from Chicago, IL and went to undergrad at The Art Institute of Chicago.
SLIPPERY:
If we look at weeping for example and say that this is the highest form of signification one can locate within an experience with an artwork:
(People mention ad nausuem being brought to tears when faced with the beauty of a Mark Rothko painting for example.)
Culture's supposed highest form of visual production: what does it mean when this sensation is found more commonly within culture's lowest forms of visual production? Does the biological act of being brought to tears by a combination of external stimuli lose its value? Do the deceivingly calculated psychological exploits perfected by the advertising and Hollywood film industries explain this sensation? Does this prompt us to re-evaluate how we understand our experiences? How do we as viewers locate meaning in our experiences with aesthetic production be it artwork or advertisement, and how is it that we can tell them apart?
This might seem like a relatively basic question but if I were to say that the experience of looking at Richard Prince's rephotographed Marlboro ads made me weep, then what would be the difference when encountering the original as a magazine spread -- would there be some kind of meaning inherent in that experience if the ad brought me to tears as well as the Prince? Surely people don't cry when looking at these works, but there is something to be said about the nature of how we experience our world considering the ubiquity of appropriation, not just in visual culture but in music, advertising and films -- all aspects of aesthetic production. What now are the mechanisms employed by art that let you know that it is art? And how are we qualifying these experiences?
My work sits at the locus of the formal and the conceptual and playfully investigates how these two approaches to artmaking inform one another. The strategies I employ are used to look at what it is that qualifies something as one designation of cultural production vs. another; how we understand these experiences and glean meaning from them. SAYRE GOMEZ
Media
Schedule
from November 10, 2012 to December 31, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-11-10 from 19:00 to 21:00