american allure
January 10, 2008- February 16, 2008
Reception: January 10, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
547 W 27th St
American Still Life
by Willie N. Steiner
John Monaco's AMERICAN STILL LIFE series brings together two disparate
media, digital sculpture and images from the World Wide Web. Harkening
to Caravaggio's classic painting "Eros as Victor, 1596-1598" and the
subjects of "Easy Riders" magazine, Monaco has developed a new
language in the history of the still life. Monaco's objects in this
series are purely digital, never taking a three-dimensional form and
the synthetic models and their environments are appropriated from
publicly available sources.
The result of Monaco's investigation is a definition of the
artist/sculptor in the digital era and the age of information. Showing
no signs of being any less obsessive about sculptural form, surface or
texture than the likes of Brancussi, Monaco produces elegant
idiosyncratic hybrid objects of some unknown origin. These objects are
neither classical nor modernist, they simply are. They almost act as
stand-ins for sculpture and speak directly to a thing's objecthood.
It is also important to note that Monaco has chosen to present these
visual homogenizations as a two-dimensional print. This seemingly odd
presentation of the sculpture/model combination only helps to
strengthen Monaco's position in the age of mechanical reproduction,
where by completely removing the object from its digital inception and
three-dimensionality, yet calling attention to its inseparability.
One must come to Monaco's AMERICAN STILL LIFE series with the
sculptural seriousness by which these poetic objects were produced
but, at the same time, find the humor, which is their by-product.
Visceral Collage
Shane Murray
This body of work is driven by a desire to add a three dimensional
element to collage and to bring organic form to magazine images. The
series is inspired by the twisted and reshaped automobile forms of
sculptor John Chamberlain and by my own desire to expand a magazine's
content out of its bound form. Each piece uses whole magazines, cut
up,rearranged and re-presented as a sort of meat pulp landscape which
conveys the magazine's subject as both organic form and raw material.
These visceral collages immediately display the guts of a magazine
through loose intuitive movement, impasto application and texture.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show| Location | map | | Address | 547 W 27th St, 6th Fl New York (Chelsea) NY, 10001 United States | | Phone | 718-417-1180 | | Hours | Mon-Sat 10-6 | | | |
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