Now, More Than Ever is a group exhibition that uncannily and inventively reinterprets “appropriation.” Oreet Ashery, Jimmy Baker, Alex Hubbard and Johannes Vanderbeek redeploy and re-contextualize original sources to produce insightful works that transcend their constituent elements.

Oreet Ashery combines live art, video, photography, drawing and sculpture in a practice that pushes personal and political representations into previously unchartered territories. In Now, More Than Ever, she presents the Village Series, vivid digital drawings inspired by news reports. Their stylized realism plays with illustration and reportage to explore the limits of the news media and their stranglehold on political symbolism and image-making.

Jimmy Baker explores bio- and sub-cultural systems in startlingly visual and original ways. Here he presents an unnerving painting of the lead singer of thrash metal band Nuclear Assault, an almost saintly portrait that projects a disarming innocence, and a customized “I-Pod” sound sculpture with a positive yet disquieting text that poses unsettling questions about our relationship to technological innovation.

Alex Hubbard works in video, sound, and 2 and 3D media, exploring responses to social fragmentation and communal anxiety. Here he paints over and around fake “found” posters to create near-abstractions of revelatory vibrancy. His mark-making has an arbitrariness and flatness that strikingly counterbalances the depth of the posters laying beneath.

Johannes Vanderbeek creates complex sculptural forms that articulate dramas and atmospheres through intriguing confluences of sign, symbol and figure. For Now, More Than Ever, he assembles degraded pages of Time magazine to create an imposing sculptural piece that appears ambivalently utopian. The original magazines are configured into a portal through which a peace symbol is formed, underscoring Time’s view of power relations with a guarded idealism.