(Im)material
Opening Reception:
Saturday, November 12, 2011
6:30 p.m. - 10:30 p.m.
at
RECESS
1127 SE 10th Avenue
Portland, OR 97214
Open Hours:
Wednesday 4:30 - 7:30 p.m.
(Im)material addresses the divide between what’s there and what’s not. What does it mean to be made of material? How is our visceral existence affirmed when we encounter other beings? There’s no room for bodily detritus in the quick and effortless navigation through what we call the virtual. As the technicolor veil slips away, one is left amidst a seemingly immaterial atmosphere . A zone where physical contact is confined to the brushing of ‘cookies’ off a hard drive or the deep pulsing of fiber optics under our feet. By and large, artists in our technological zeitgeist - like those represented in (Im)material - are moved by this abandonment. As with any disturbance, they are compelled to respond with divergent methods. In this case, across a spectrum from a primordial return to brute physicality to appropriations of the digital that exacerbate their dystopian worldview.
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Silver Chain and Peace Sign has to do with feeling hypnotized and fragmented as a result of entering a particular immersive digital hallucination. The specific hallucination described in this video concerns materialized mana - materia - and peace symbols. Those who have played the popular RPG Final Fantasy 7 will best understand the correlation between these two motifs.
Jay Spicero’s process involves an attentiveness to discovery, converted into meditation logs that then go on to inspire his final products. His work kind of has to do with his existence in a fragmented state of reality where digital and virtual life is pretty much the same thing.
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From the artist: ‘Sculpture is the practice of being. It asks for physical presence. It demands an awareness of your body and of the bodies around you and an awareness of sculpture as body.’
Michelle Liccardo’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young and the Portland Contemporary Art’s 2009 Time Based Art Festival. In 2010 she worked collaboratively with artist Nanda D’Agostino on her digital, public art project, Intellectual Ecosystem, installed at Portland State University. Her studio practice involves making sculptural work using a variety of media.
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Without adequate space to produce sculptures or paintings, Kyle has started to make miniature process-based sculptures on - and with - xerox machines and scanners. These machines, intended for the diffusion of information, stand in as mediators for documentation. What results is handful of images resembling sculptures that exist in an intangible space. These works present alternate forms of representation that take these images out of the context of the virtual and translate them using the formal vocabulary of exhibition spaces.
Kyle Raquipiso received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2011. He currently lives and works in Portland, OR.
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DEEP FREEZE presents an image of frozen ground, abstracted as a piece of virtually simulated falling cloth. The frozen cloth covers objects rendering them in a state of temporary and symbolic paralysis. The piece explores potential room for icy stillness in digital media and the implications of a cold and frozen digital landscape.
Alex Mackin Dolan lives and works in Portland OR. His work investigates the differences between the real and virtual elements of everyday life. He works with various media to render images between these worlds.
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Keats compares his Lamia, the woman-serpent, to a rainbow as an attempt to wrestle the rainbow from the “cold hands of philosophy”, referring to Newton and his then recent demonstration of a chromatic spectrum by the refraction of white light. In The End of the Rainbow (an axiom), Biado translates Keats’ position, his words, his argument into a physical rainbow. Biado revisits the romantic critique, but here to reveal the capacity for science to enliven - rather than nullify - the majesty of the natural world.
Chase Biado has seen aliens in Portland, Oregon. He has exhibited work in Portland at 12128/Boatspace, Car Hole Gallery (R.I.P.), Appendix Project Space, Ditch Projects in Springfield, OR, as well as at Pacific Northwest College of Arts, Portland State University and the University of Ulsan in Ulsan, South Korea.
Jay Spicero
954.579.6105