Event
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Royal NoneSuch Gallery
January 9 - February 14, 2016Info
4231 Telegraph Avenue Oakland, CA 94609 Google Map »Reception
January 9, 2016 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm
Everything Is Collective, Untitled (Archive Image), inkjet print, 2013
Echo Decoy Limit showcases photographs and installations by Everything Is Collective (E.I.C.), the collaborative project of Los Angeles and Chicago-based artists Aaron Hegert, Jason Lukas, and Zachary Norman. With their Deliberate Operations series, E.I.C. explores two core principles of contemporary image culture: iteration and collaboration. The artists use words (including echo, decoy, and limit) culled from an old military operations handbook, as criteria to guide their image-making. First, Hegert, Lukas, and Norman work individually. Then they share their photographs with each other, making hundreds of subsequent images inspired by the first set of images.
Working in isolation and in conversation with each other, their ideas evolve and emerge over time, across various locations, and multiple authors. The resulting photographs look like they could be illustrations from a physics textbook or evidence from an archeological dig. But further inspection reveals a closer allegiance to the uncanny and the mystical. This clash between the empirical and the magical provokes viewers to attempt to piece together peculiar visual clues, but instead of providing answers, the photographs leave us with an exhilarating sense of wonder and curiosity.
The exhibition at Royal NoneSuch Gallery emphasizes E.I.C.’s collaborative and iterative process. The show includes framed exhibition prints as well as an installation of E.I.C.’s massive self-generated archive of source material, which consists of earlier versions of images. With multiple variations of an idea on view together, we experience the playful process of a group for whom everything is collective.