Event
Miguel Arzabe: /*Reject Algorithms*/ & Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon: DrawingsPost an Event »
CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions
March 31 - March 31, 2014Info
3191 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94110 Google Map »
Miguel Arzabe makes work poised between the canons of conceptual art and abstract painting. For this solo show /*Reject Algorithms*/ Arzabe uses a choreography of his body, in the act of making, to explore the relevance of painting in contemporary media and the ‘screen-deep’ phenomena of our daily subjective experience. In mathematics and engineering ‘rejection sampling’ is a basic technique used to generate observations of a task-orientated object through its function. The syntax /* is computer code used for comments, not language for the computer to perform, but instead intended to give human programmers information about what the code is supposed to do, who made it, why, etc.
"I documented my painting process with a digital camera. These videos were layered over a stop-motion animation of an improvised dance/performance before a large canvas suspended in front of a green screen and mirrors. The chroma key function was used to subtract video, revealing the dynamic relationship between the hand, the body, the canvas, and the screen.
I was manipulating the documentation of the paintings in the same way that I handle paint, thereby expanding my painting process to be conscious of its digital mediation. Like the physical paintings, the videos are built up over time and subtracted to reveal the trace of previous actions - ones that evince gestural "brush strokes" through improvised poses, leaps, and movements performed by the body in the arena of the canvas. The goal is to upend predetermined formulas and to question assumed hierarchies. "Finished" paintings share a space with the remnants of their creation (tape, drop cloth, etc.), physical objects are influenced by their virtual representations (and vice-versa), and a non-linear progression encourages the viewer to choose where to focus attention while rewarding multiple viewings."
/*Reject Algorithms*/ draws on the legacy of post-war action painting, where the photographic documentation of the painting performance begins to approach the visual significance of the actual painting. Arzabe extends this art-historical lineage of meta-investigation into the present, exploring painting's relevance to a contemporary moment that is dominated by digital screens, which insistently reflect back at us our own hyper-subjective representations.
Concurrent with Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon: Drawings.
For over a decade, Los Angeles-based artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon has been exploring sound in relationship to the body through installation, sculpture and performance. Gordon work stems from an acute awareness of human experience in relationship to architecture and constructed environments, as informed by systems theory, acoustic engineering, industrial design, mid-century modernism and post-punk noise-based performance. For her solo show at CULT, and concurrent with her first solo museum show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Gordon has created a series of abstract drawings that reference how sound as information is felt in the body. The extruding lines and carefully rendered colored orbs suggest both ethereality and embodiment. Flesh-colored and curvilinear, resonant spaces float on ordered grids—reminiscent of cavernous environments, anatomy and the outdated 2-dimensional worlds of laboratory notebooks. Illuminating context, Gordon states “I’m alluding to how audio filters shape sound in the digital domain and architecture resonates sound in the physical realm.”