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There/Not
There Jason
Salavon
Each artist in this exhibit, to a degree of ambiguity necessary for their respective projects, has purposely manipulated the viewer's ability to see certain aspects of each piece. By employing both enhancement and disguise, objects are made simultaneously accessible and elusive, visible and invisible, present and absent. Cognitive as well as optical aspects of perception are exploited in dramatically personal ways to achieve distinctly poetic essays on vision, memory and meaning. Jason Salavon uses computer technology to create amalgamations, images made from merging digital scans taken from series-format photographs like portraits for weddings or high school yearbooks. The final image he produces reveals the underlying similarities of the source material in an unsettling blur. Each print in the exhibit is produced through software authored by the artist designed to generate mean and median pixel values in each of the scans taken of the original photos. The result is an image that heightens our awareness of social and visual convention by revealing the deleterious effect of these conventions on individual variation. Salavon's images, simultaneously familiar and strange, raise fascinating questions regarding our disposition toward conformity. Having hidden the image in plain sight, Devorah Sperber's work relies on our getting beyond her wall hanging's reticent physical components. Spools of colored thread, themselves threaded onto hanging vertical lines, create a strong sense of material presence while implying an illusion through intense but dispersed color. When viewed through a lens provided by the artist the art historical image of each piece is clearly revealed, placing the viewer in the role of retinal witness, physically mimicking what goes on inside the eye. The participatory intimacy the viewer experiences serves to amplify the always troublesome distance between an actual masterpiece and its mere reproduction. Debbi Sutton creates metaphorical resonance in a simple wooden chair. In this particular piece, designed for this exhibit, Sutton gives us a dismantled chair wrapped mummy-like in white string, scattered on the gallery floor. Floating above is the shadow of the fully constituted chair cast by disparate parts of paper cutouts suspended at varying distances from a light in the center of the gallery. The shadow overtakes the actual chair in visual prominence, thus giving the illusion a greater sense of reality than the physical remnants below. The chair, as the title suggests, is meaningless, but significantly so. Its several manifestations are forever caught between differing realities, its former use, and its unlikely future use. Moving
in a large city from one rental apartment to another is an exercise
in spatial awareness executed by a separating of the personal from
the shared, the private from the public. Eugenie Tung explores the
deeper aspect of this exercise in a series of photographs taken
of rented apartments prior to her moving out. The photos are partially
painted in order to remove her belongings from the image. By choosing
color that matches the space, a Jasper Johns-like double reading
leaves us with the artist's possessions visible only as ghost-like
traces in the psychologically vacated emptiness. Peter
Malone
Exhibition Checklist Jason
Salavon 100
Special Moments (Newlyweds) Class
of 1988 ... image Class
of 1967 100
Special Moments (Kids with Santa)
After
Picasso After
Van Eyck ... image
Meaningless
Chair V - Extended... image
15
Lawton Street, Living Room Area 15
Lawton Street, Home Office Area 23b
Horace Court, Kitchen and Dining Area 930
Indian Street, Home Office Area 1775
SE Columbia Drive, Living Room... image 930
Indian Street, Dining Area
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