Jacquaro Rihet Gallery presents Sound Away from Sense, a group exhibition featuring work by Lea Cetera, Ivy Haldeman, Keren Oxman and Dolsy Smith.

Sound Away from Sense, found among the accouterments of an East Village apartment, takes texture and surface as points of query, webs of cultural continuity, and spaces of cognitive dissonance. The artist as anthropologist wanders among cultural artifacts, picking through the residue of crafted identities – magazine spreads, portraiture, costumes, canonical texts – to expose the interstitial syntax that hides the origin of their own distortion. Techniques of collage, mash-up and masking foreground the crucial question for a politics of the aesthetic: does the opacity of the senses mask or reveal?

Lea Cetera presents a furry mask and video, emphasizing the act of viewing and voyeurism. Her work plays with ideas of constructed identities, the fetishized object, entertainment and role-play. She is influenced by theater and performance, and works within the vernaculars of various sub-cultures to address the binaries between the seen and the unseen, public and private, the constructed and the real.

Ivy Haldeman takes the standard office format, 8 1/2 by 11, black and white print, to delight in the gestural similarities of the publications Town and Country and Cowboy Way. It is playful block building, creating tetris-like forms that conflate diamond rings with cowboy hats. Her mischievous material breakdown becomes droll reconstructions.

Keren Oxman’s work speculates on the intersection of art and anthropology, the temporal artifact and the exploration of cultural otherness. Her work employs techniques of collision, recombination, archiving and the evocation of nostalgia to create conceptual proximity between disparate sources.

Dolsy Smith expresses his interest in procedural writing and the creative potential of modern techniques of information processing, including the mash-up and the Markov chain. The piece in question was composed in part using speech-recognition software; it represents a wildly unfaithful or ergodic translation of passages from Marx and Vladimir Nabokov.

Lea Cetera is an artist, performance artist and filmmaker based in New York City. She recieved her BFA from the Cooper Union in 2005 and is currently an MFA candidate in Visual Arts at Columbia University, 2012. Cetera has performed and exhibited at John Connelly Presents, Guild and Greyshkul Gallery, Galapagos Art Space, Theater for the New City, Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, Anthology Film Archives, and Portugal Arte 2010.

Ivy Haldeman is a painter and installation artist based in New York City. She received her BFA from the Cooper Union in 2008. Haldeman has shown in independent exhibitions throughout Brooklyn, repeatedly with Bring to Light: Nuit Blanche New York, and with the artist collective OnceLibre in Buenos Aires.

Keren Oxman is an artist based in New York City. She received her MFA from the the Royal College of Art, London in 2006 and her BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art, Jerusalem in 2003. Oxman is the recipient of the Clore Fellowship Biannual and was shortlisted for the 2010 Man-Group Photography Prize. Most recently, she exhibited at the 2011 Tel Aviv Contemporary Art Fair.

Dolsy Smith is a poet and a librarian at George Washington University in Washington, DC. He is presently at work on a book about the fate of the imagination in critical and informational discourse. A recent essay on work, poetry, and information appears at The Poetic Labor Project (http://labday2010.blogspot.com/2011/06/dolsy-smith.html).