Jeremy Chance & Tamar Halpern & Davis Rhodes offers the first European presentation of the work of three young American artists who all currently live and work in Brooklyn, New York.
Jeremy Chance as a painter recently graduated from Hunter college in NY. For the present series of works Chance has based himself on a series of advertisements for antidepressant medication. For Effexor a hired actress pretends to suffer from symptoms like fatigue, boredom or depression. Effexor offers a faked representation of illness, both an attempt and failure to identify with the disease of our times. The images were taken from advertisements in popular magazines like Reader’s Digest. Chance disconnects them from their initial purpose to persuade and evoke identification. The paintings were executed in a technique that is reminiscent of screenprinting, but were painted by hand in a painstaking and time consuming process. Chance is active in literally deconstructing images and recomposing them. Torrentdist was based on an internet video. It shows the distortion that is inherent in digital images especially with video when different stages of the same image start to overlap and disintegrate into pixelated parts, hence the title of the work Torrentdist. Unlike modernist abstraction, Torrentdist does not deal with generalization, fragmentation or sublimation but with the implosion and self destruction of contemporary visual culture.
Tamar Halpern uses both digital and traditional/analogue photographic processes. Halpern creates digital chromira prints. With her work she is active both in occupying, amplifying and disrupting the modernist legacy of the abstract image and the conventions of its genre within photography. Halpern departs from existing images that are subjected to digital manipulations. The prints of these manipulations are rephotographed, scanned and reprinted as large scale prints. Her work demonstrates a highly distinct aesthetic of reproduction within multilayered, high resolution gloss prints.
Davis Rhodes ‘ enamel paintings on canvas and foam board are based on ubiquitous signs and can refer both to the design of a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, the vernacular language of posters in the street, or sign posts. His practice combines the extremes of hard edge geometric abstraction with a more open, porous practice that is undermining the binary, knowledgeable assumptions of the modern pictorial realm. There is an uncontrolled erosion at work, confounding the frontal, unified perception of form and knowledge. As a practice it identifies with a legacy that goes back to the work of artists as diverse as Blinky Palermo, Raoul de Keyser or Sergej Jensen where abstraction is permeated with softer strategies, and repressed forms or materials. The glossy enamel contrasts with the delicate traces of a finger that creates a drawing, and they are disturbed by drips and leaks that relate to the speed of work.