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ARTCAT



Paramnesiac Landscape

New York Center for Art & Media Studies
44 West 28th Street, 7th Floor, 212-213-3011
Chelsea
March 18 - April 23, 2006
Reception: Friday, March 17, 6 - 8 PM


This exhibition highlights the work of nine artists who, in varying distinctive ways, create imaginary landscape worlds through the interplay of memory, fantasy and recent scientific trends. The title of the exhibition, Paramnesiac Landscapes arises in response to the way these artists merge macro with micro, past with future and fantastic biological and technological discoveries as a means to evoke alternative, often hallucinatory, highly personal cosmologies. The media here ranges from painting, works on paper, sound video to installation. Each references filmic, computer/electronic/digital or manufactured surfaces that recreates an overall effect of blurring virtual with physical space.

The artists included in this show, Andrea Loefke, Tony Luib, the collaborative team Oliver Lyons and Aaron Yassin, Kanishka Raja, Cristi Rinklin, Sarah Trigg, Sarah Walker and Daniel Zeller work in an emphatically obsessive, repetitive manner that marks and slows time as a strategy to assert the individual within our increasingly accelerated social environment rife with accumulation and competing realities. Densely packed, linear, patterned or layered designs, frequently embedded with variegated color, form the basis of Luib’s, Lyons, Rinklin’s, Walker’s, Trigg’s, and Zeller’s work. Elements of fantasy found in the resulting abstract surfaces derive from a combination of cellular biology, natural or architectural history, topographical or galaxial systems and other scientific imaging to produce a mesmerizing, hypnotic optical effect that is slightly disturbing but nevertheless pleasurable to view. Conflating the microscopic with the telescopic and technological, these artists push us to confront how we absorb and store information filtered through our memories.

Alternatively, other artists Raja and Loefke merge fictive narratives with actual physical spaces in order to construct environments that suggest unstable realities and overlapping worlds both familiar and fantastical. Oliver Lyons sound videos Triad- Saigon, Stockholm, Cairo and Still Progression (co-collaboration with Aaron Yassin) explore the confluence of shifting realities and multiple levels of spatial and temporal stratums through kaleidoscopic, abstract imagery and sound spliced together from distinct periods and cultures. Taken together the work, - shot through with sinister elements from sci-fi- conveys a concern with recent global, digital, and biotechnological developments and underscores the porousness of physical reality.

Related blog posts: Hungry Hyaena

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