Bespoke Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 6th Floor, 212-695-8201
Chelsea
October 12 - November 14, 2006
Reception: Thursday, October 12, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site
Sola is presenting Watercolor, a collaboration with New York-based playwright Will Eno. In this video, the viewer is guided through a short `how to make watercolor’ tutorial, which illustrates the fundamentals of making a landscape watercolor painting while simultaneously offering a meditation on life, death and the creative process. Accompanying the video is a recent series of Sola’s watercolor paintings, inspired by his fascination with coming of age films.
Sola’s projects employ a range of cinematic references, from specific film images and props, to the contrivance of hackneyed scene set-ups prevalent in genre films. The underlying theme of his most recent projects is an examination of what it is to be a man as presented in the cinema. In typical fashion, the manner in which he chooses to engage the viewer affords us eccentric, sometimes shocking, and always thought-provoking perspectives on conventional elements of the American cultural paradigm – ones that have escaped recent polemical scrutiny and have virtually disappeared from the popular vernacular. In Studio Visit (2005), Sola quietly rocked the Los Angeles art community. The project involved Sola jumping out and through a window in his hillside studio in Mount Washington, CA during private studio visits, leaving curators, critics and dealers drop-jawed, confused or paralyzed by hysterical laughter.
The centerpiece of a survey exhibition at the Atlanta College of Art in 2006 featured the performance Male Fashion Models Make Conceptual Art. For the opening reception of the exhibition, Sola hired five male models from Elite Models to make art on a low-lying platform. In Riding with Adult Video Performers (2002), Sola rode a rollercoaster with a group of male porn stars. In the video Saint Henry Composition (2001), Sola, in his unpadded mufti, is tackled by a horde of uniformed high school football players.