Ivin Ballen Sebastiaan Bremer Brian Dettmer Jim Dingilian Richard Klein Nikki S. Lee Ariana Page Russell Devorah Sperber Richard Thatcher

Schroeder Romero is pleased to announce Deviate, a group exhibition featuring works by artists who are altering materials and repurposing objects that prompts viewers to investigate the act of looking and perceiving. The artists in Deviate tend to focus on the conceptual and physical properties of ordinary materials, in some cases even their own bodies, exploiting or manipulating them to achieve a certain vision.

Ivin Ballen composes maquettes of commonplace items and then casts fiberglass and aqua resin sculptures of their negative space. He then paints with acrylic and watercolor with trompe l’oeil effects that reference the original found objects.

Sebastiaan Bremer blankets his photographs with ink dots that create a screen effect over the image beneath which compels the viewer to look at, and through, the hand-drawn surface to see the complete image. Neither the dots nor the photographic images ever fully describe, demonstrating Bremer’s central philosophical observation that all apprehension is necessarily subjective and incomplete.

With the precision of a surgeon, Brian Dettmer uses tweezers, scalpels and other medical instruments to alter books by carving out and exposing selected images and text to create intricate three-dimensional works that reveal alternative interpretations of the books.

Jim Dingilian uses candle smoke to create drawings inside glass bottles that depict suburban fringe areas such as the edges of parking lots, the backs of shopping centers, and patches of woods between housing developments. The ubiquity of these locales and their ambiguity - simultaneously everywhere and nowhere - make them areas of great potential and they take on new meaning through the viewer’s eyes.

Richard Klein’s sculptures convert transparent media, such as eyeglass and sunglass lenses, bottles, and liquid into prismatic passageways refracting ambient light, casting it out in shimmering patterns on the surrounding architecture. His work transforms light into something intangible and invests his sculptures with a less-objective, abstract component.

In her Projects series, Nikki S. Lee infiltrated particular subcultures and ethnic groups and after spending several weeks participating in the group’s routine activities, she photographed herself with these groups. Lee’s projects propose questions regarding identity and social behavior. Lee believes that “essentially life itself is a performance. When we change our clothes to alter our appearance, the real act is the transformation of our way of expression – the outward expression of our psyche.”

Using her skin as her canvas, Ariana Page Russell creates a series of “tattoos” to adorn her own body. The source of these “tattoos” is unique; the artist has a skin condition called dermatographia in which painless scratching on her skin’s surface creates red welts that remain for about 30 minutes. Russell photographs herself before the welts disappear. Rather than hiding behind her condition, Russell is empowered by it. She puts herself in front of the camera playing with ideas of fashion and concepts of beauty, what she terms “the bloom of adornment.”

At first glance, many of Devorah Sperber’s installations appear to be abstract fields composed of spools of thread. However, upon a closer look through a clear acrylic viewing sphere, the thread spool “pixels” develop into recognizable images. While many contemporary artists use digital technology to add complexity to their work, Sperber aims to humble technology through the use of mundane materials such as spools of thread and chenille stems, (pipe cleaners), which are then assembled with low-tech, labor-intensive processes creating works that challenge the way we interact with the world.

In his Best of… series Richard Thatcher plays with the position of Artforum Magazine as an appealing container of slick advertisements and pronouncements of the very best of the year’s art production. The magazine is screwed down and sealed away in a handsome industrial package rendering the magazine unreadable.