Abstract
Petra Cortright: Niki, Lucy, Lola, Viola DEPART FOUNDATION LOS ANGELES JULY 9-SEPTEMBER 19, 2015 Ben Jones X 8 ACE GALLERY BEVERLY HILLS JULY 11-SEPTEMBER 30, 2015 Casey Reas: Linear Perspective CHARLIE JAMES GALLERY LOS ANGELES SEPTEMBER 5-OCTOBER 17, 2015 For the post-internet generation, using appropriated content is commonplace. The proliferation of images, sounds, texts, and fashions available online has come to be regarded as the subject matter of daily life and always there for reuse. In an interview with Marisa Olson for Rhizome.org, Christiane Paul remarked on the practice of many artists working in the digital medium: They may create online projects but they might also do object-based art, paintings or sculptures that are deeply informed by or use elements of the net or its language, which is what the term postinternet tries to capture.... (Sadly I now frequently see postinternet used as a catchy term for art made by anyone born roughly after 1985 or for a sensibility characterized by an uncomplicated reverence for fame and success.) (1) Post-internet has in many ways become a kind of catch-all phrase for artists working in the digital realm, or making mixed-media works from appropriated sources. This broad use of the term pushes it past the breaking point, where it becomes so open-ended as to be meaningless. A better definition of post-internet art is that it not only uses the internet as a point of departure, but that it is technology (software/computer) dependent. The work of Los Angeles-based artists Petra Cortright, Ben Jones, and Casey Reas can be examined in this light. All have recently created large-scale installations of projected imagery, and while their projects are conceptually and visually diverse, they are all aware of the importance of an immersive experience. Their use of software in creating an aesthetic aligned with the principles of abstraction also ties them together. The subject of Reas's installation Linear Perspective at Charlie James Gallery was the mass media: newspapers, broadcast television, and social networks. The title piece, Linear Perspective, is Reas's latest software-based work, an ever-mutating collection of images from the front page of the New York Times in 2015. In the digital age, what does the front-page photograph connote? In the printed edition, it refers to the image above the fold that is used to sell the paper. Reas repurposes and digitally manipulates one image each day that is representative of that day's headline news. In the darkened space, elongated digital brushstrokes emanate from a fixed point at the edge of a large wall, moving across it to create a shape reminiscent of a sideways funnel or an old-fashioned hearing aid. Each stroke reveals a new abstracted and distorted version of the original, and their accumulation will become a visual archive of the year. Reas adds to the work daily and plans to do so until the end of 2015. The silent computer-generated animation offers no critical or insightful perspective on the imagery or its content as it gracefully glides across the wall. Reas's custom software distorts the original rectangular shape of the source image, morphing it into a narrow wavy horizontal stroke. In two complementary monitor-based works, rather than use one image per day to represent a year, Reas created software-generated animations from all the images in a single day's edition. Titled Today's Ideology and accompanied by each edition's date (July 19, 2015) and (August 23, 20/5), these generative works cycle through the images, forming an ever-changing pattern of horizontal and diagonal brushstrokes or stripes. These pieces are Reas's first to use readable, recognizable, imagery. Also included in the exhibition were past works that used broadcast media as source material, transforming those signals into abstracted compositions. …
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