Participating artists: A. J. Bocchino, Sarah Davis, Christopher Daniels, Douglas Gordon, Kara Hamilton, Oliver Helden, Millree Hughes, Richard Kalina, Miyeon Lee, Carol Peligian, Gary Rough, Gary Simmons, Joni Sternbach, Fred Tomaselli, Phoebe Washburn

Wallpaper LAB collaborates with contemporary artists to produce limited edition wallpaper. Curator Ron Keyson conceived Wallpaper LAB a year ago. His experience with exhibition preparation, installation methods and materials persuaded him that the tremendous potential for artists to generate ideas and images to be realized in the medium of short-run digitally generated wallpaper presented him with an equally exciting opportunity. “I want to radicalize the design world by introducing content into a medium normally devoid of meaning.”

Historically, mediums of fresco and mural painting have anchored art on the wall, and wallpaper was a decorative medium rooted in ideals of taste and class. In today’s art practice, artists and curators produce installations realized by fabricators, the lines between original and reproduction are extremely dynamic and production methods are gestating new forms. Ron Keyson’s Wallpaper LAB has offered both established and emerging artists opportunities to make new work in a medium that has its own traditions and relies on certain conventions and structures.

It has been analyzed that there are seventeen basic structures for the repeat patterns of conventional wallpaper and that every conceivable pattern can be distilled to a mathematical formula. The artists working with Wallpaper LAB have imagined a much wider range of possibilities. They have conceived of forms and content that relate visually and conceptually to their works in their primary medium. They have looked at the medium of thirty-six inch wide rolls of paper as an opportunity to make a single large-scale image with a top, bottom and sides, a flexible structure with the potential to cover large expanses of architectural space, or the intensity to activate one small wall, to define a space as powerfully as any medium of artistic expression. This is a digital medium, short-run, ondemand.

It is permanent, disposable, replaceable. The show will present the wallpaper works in an ensemble installation. The gallery will be wallpapered from floor to ceiling from front to back in a contiguous wrap.