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Syjuco, Pacific Super, 2004, Fuji Lightjet print,
Editions of 5,
Available in 24" x 30" or 48" x 60""
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James Harris Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition
titled “Message in a Bottle.” In bringing together a
wide range of mediums – including sculpture, photography,
painting and installation – the show focuses on how artists
transform the expected visual utility of an object to multiple pictorial
possibilities. These are artists who inherently investigate the
origins of their subjects, creating fictive spaces and new relationships
by placing disparate or unusual objects together in dynamic ways.
Helga Steppan, for instance, works by setting
up clearly defined parameters and then documenting the process and
results. In her series ‘See Through,’ Steppan divided
all of her belongings into the full spectrum of different color
groupings. These groupings were then arranged according to classical
compositional values and photographed. The images that result are
magnetic monochrome photographs that both reflect the artist’s
persona and deny our understanding of it.
Similarly Francisco Guerrero culls from the unlimited
piles of imagery in popular culture. Using it only as source material,
Guerrero then washes over these images with a seductive, masterly
hand. At the same time, he emphasizes the anonymity of his subjects.
Through the tension between a highly painterly and personal style
and the exceedingly editorialized airbrushed content, Guerrero calls
into question the way we, almost literally, consume images as reality.
Andrew Witkin collects, creates, and organizes
a variety of elements to present multiple connections between the
aural, visual and textual parts. In Sculpture #2, a table-top installation,
the artist has placed records, books, newspaper article, photographs
around empty wine bottles and wine glasses on a long table. The
placement of each object is key to transforming the context of its
origin into an open ended narrative that tells a story about the
way the artist navigates the world.
Stephanie Syjuco takes objects that look strangely
familiar and manipulates them to new ends, so as to mutate icons
and imagery towards a different service. For example the photograph
titled Pacific Super addresses issues of global production, consumption
and cross-cultural translation, using the familiar image of a world-famous
"mystical” European landmark "Stonehenge" and
everyday Asian goods.
Eric Elliott uses subtle variations of grey oil
paint to show the viewer that all things are interconnected, that
everything is part of a larger whole. His non-tradition still life
paintings hover between abstraction and realism. The heavy impasto
surface created by his brush work reveals objects while pushing
them into pictorial abstraction.
In contrast to Elliott’s dense applications of paint Joseph
Park’s compositions are impeccably mannered. Without
blending a single color directly on the canvas, Park’s cool
realism is able to evoke multiple references. From anime to pre-Raphaelite
painting and cubist sensibilities, Park explores and implodes the
history of vanitas. He infuses traditional techniques with an almost
unprecedented cinematic and pictorial realism so that while the
compositions appear to be simple and echo snapshots they are complex
narratives of the private moments.
Though Roy McMakin’s sculptures resemble
useful/functional objects, he pushes them past their own utility.
In the exhibition, for instance, the 2-dimensonal picture plane
of a painting breaks into a sculptural object. This layful give
and take acts a vehicle for the artist to investigate formal concepts
while distancing them from functionalism. McMakin disrupts our notion
of the domestic realm by referencing a vernacular decorative motif
commonly found in mass produced cabinetry, defining and challenging
the relationship between art-making a design.
Through freedom of reference and quotation, as well as a rejection
of conventional hierarchies among sources, Adam Pendleton
similarly aims to upset comfortably subjective interpretations of
history and culture. Pendleton’s ten-inch, ceramic black cubes
for instance invoke minimalist practices but the rounded sides and
corners deliberately shirk off linearity and geometric definition.
The highly glazed objects hover between 1970s decoration and contemporary
sculpture.
Like the diverse range of art in the show, each of these artists
comes to their practice from very different backgrounds, which means
that their approaches to what can be termed “contemporary
still life” are as varied. Some have roots in traditional
painting others work conceptually with language and image. Either
way, what unites these artists is that each incorporates both a
public and private vocabulary in their practice and, in so doing,
a message resounds: In the hand of the artist, no icon is just destined
to one meaning; images perpetually shift and signify as their audiences
change.
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Stephanie
Syjuco
Everything Must Go (Grey Market), 2006
Digital prints, foamboard, paper, tape, foam; dimensions variable
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