Event
The Cure for the Uncanny Valley/LOOSE-Y, Part I: THIS SHIT IS GOLDPost an Event »
Steven Wolf Fine Arts
November 8 - November 20, 2014Info
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http://www.stevenwolffinearts.com/
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(415) 263-3677
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 8th, 6-9pm
Steven Wolf Fine Arts invites you to the opening of The Cure for the Uncanny Valley, an exhibition of new work by Chris Finley.
Absent from the gallery scene since 2009, the Petaluma-based artist returns with a group of informal sculptures and paintings, many of which are designed to be taken apart piece by piece and explored by the viewer. Composed from every day objects like pencils and highway asphalt reflectors that have been re-crafted with an obsessive energy, the sculptures tease the viewer with cultural and auto-biographical significance but in the end remain ambiguous.
The works are puzzles. Some are literally made from puzzle pieces that Finley has combined with other cast-off objects like welcome mats and stuffed animals into hardened resinous planks that awkwardly stack. Coded political messages filtered through random choices and chance actions are often secreted in hidden compartments.
Some of the works harken back to Finley’s early sculptures, which have been compared to the box-in-a-box mystery structure of Russian dolls, or, more productively, to the experience of surfing the internet, one link leading to another. It’s this digital compatibility that allows the artist to assert the primacy of the physical studio and not lapse into nostalgia for life before the internet.
Although Finley’s work is by design an unreliable compass whose arrow moves according to its own mysterious inner workings, there is an air of resistance to a regime that pressures us to robotically consume rather than create our own unique reality and an affection for the material world that borders on pantheism.
Chris Finley lives and works in Petaluma, California. His work has been included in national and international Museum exhibitions and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus,Ohio, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, Wisconsin.
Finley received the SECA award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999, a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation in 2003 and the Pollock/ Krasner Foundation Grant in 2010.
Project Room:
Olivia Mole
LOOSE-Y, Part I: THIS SHIT IS GOLD
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 8th, 6-9pm
Plottering success furtive in the crawlspace of a mindbrain, skiving off in fact, sleeping too much: LOOSE-Y, proto-wo/man, depressed titan, laser-disco vision quest, oscar- hopeful; comfy with spiders and sprayed concrete foundationings s/he grapples the ancient cave-dreams of posthistrionical optimismoptimism.......vvvvckreeeeeeeekk {transmission break up] ........ something of a naivety, or was it nativity?
THIS SHIT IS GOLD
THIS IS GOLD SHIT
SHIT THIS IS GOLD
THIS IS SHIT GOLD
THIS GOLD IS SHIT
THIS SHIT IS GOLD
Olivia Mole was born in London, England in 1975. She currently lives and works in San Francisco. She worked as a set designer in the mainstream film and animation industry for over a decade and has recently returned to art practice. She attended The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, and received an MA in Production Design from the National Film and Television School in the UK. She has designed sets for John Frankenheimer, Michael Radford, Wes Anderson and multiple productions at Dreamworks Animation. Her work has been shown guerrilla style in her own garage, and at Southern Exposure, where her first solo show, YOGAFLOGOGO, will be held in 2015.
She works with live action and animated video, sculpture, drawing and performance, negotiating the tensions between imagination and the material body. Her screwball characters parody consumer languages and art-making habits as they seek to illuminate and lampoon the anxieties of a cultural Oz.