Mighty Tanaka
111 Front Street, Suite 224, 718-596-8781
DUMBO
May 21 - June 11, 2010
Reception: Friday, May 21, 6 - 9 PM
Web Site
Mighty Tanaka Gallery presents Babel Code: Osmotic Transmissions by street artists AVOID pi & infinity for their first duo show together. Peering through a semiotic Petri dish intermixed with sub-conscious communication, Babel Code uses primitive and mystical sources as well as runic references, which charges the works of art with a power and energy beyond the objects themselves.
Babel Code challenges the viewer to reconsider the basic notions of communication and cultural mutation, while providing a closer look into the artist’s own techniques of non-verbal interactions. Building upon a symbolic language shared by both artists, their influences range from a resonance of mixed signals and errant transmissions.
Their symbolism ranges from introverted Platonic deliberation and chemical structures to numerology and DNA; anything and everything from hobo marks and astronomy to grammar diagrams and physics equations.
About the Artists
AVOID pi was born the year IBM released the Personal Computer. He was raised in South Carolina, on a diet of freight trains, deep forests, punk rock, and DIY. He moved to the coast on the eve of the millennium to study both graffiti and philosophy among the flooded streets of Charleston. In 2006, he moved to New York in order to interact on a global stage. He is working on a language of abstractions in the public space, as well as empowering the political potentialities of graffiti.
infinity was born in 1962 in the Midwest. His family moved to Manhattan in 1970. Obsessions with comic books, heavy metal, and graffiti eventually embraced studies in expressionism, semiotics, and the sciences. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin at River Falls in 1986 and The School of Visual Arts in 1989. He has followed an erratic career path, but always continued his aesthetic and scholarly research.