Yossi Milo Gallery: The Skin We’re In

By artefuse On 08/09/2012 · Leave a Comment · In New York

Yossi Milo Gallery "The Skin We're In"

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to present The Skin We’re In, a group exhibition featuring the work of Lindsay Lawson, João Enxuto & Erica Love, Stephen Prina, Jon Rafman and Mark Tribe. The exhibition will be on view from August 2 – 31, 2012.

In his 1859 essay presaging the stereograph craze, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that, “Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us…” This mid-19th century fantasy about ubiquitous images has been realized in the Internet’s networked picture archive. The artists in this exhibition directly reference works made in the 20^th century, and reconstitute the art-historical canon into new, present day-forms.

For A. Trio, Lindsay Lawson studied the movements of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A by watching the YouTube video of its definitive 1978 film documentation. Lawson then invited a dancer to learn Trio A from the video and to perform it in unison with a video projection of the Rainer piece. The viewer sees both the original performance, the new performance, and the shadow of the dancer on the projection moving as one.

In Stephen Prina‘s Untitled/Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet (2012), black cord and brass pins outline the margins of absent paintings by the great early Modernist. Like a tab or an internet browser bookmark, these voids are a virtual reminder that these paintings exist somewhere in material form. Untitled/Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet will be exhibited alongside a work from the ongoing cycle Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet, in which Prina indexically draws from the complete oeuvre of Eduard Manet and reinterprets each piece in ink washes on rag paper. This series, which he began in 1988, is based on the Penguin Classics of World Art catalog entitled The Complete Paintings of Manet, which was published in 1967.

Opposites engage and contend in Jon Rafman‘s Brand New Paint Job (2010). In the BNPJ project, ordinary objects become infused with historically celebrated works of art. Each piece in the series is a deliberation between a consumer object or everyday environment and a canonized painting, the formal result of the meeting of a three-dimensional object and a two-dimensional image. Walking the receding line between art and design, Franz Kline Starbucks and the Juan Gris Reading Room are not simply more examples of the blurring of the distinction between high and low culture. Rafman suggests that history is ultimately wrapped around and involved in whatever we do.

Mark Tribe‘s photographs of landscapes found in combat video games tie the conventions of Western landscape painting with the aesthetics of contemporary military fantasy. These works, which resemble Hudson River School paintings, reveal a new way of capturing and creating beauty while blurring the lines between the real and the virtual.

João Enxuto & Erica Loves’ Anonymous Paintings (2011- ) are inkjet prints on fabric that serve as surrogates for paintings exhibited in the collections of major museums. These images are derived from screen captures of Google Art Project’s virtual “walk-throughs” of art museums where paintings have been blurred because of copyright restrictions. In the process of transferring digital files into three-dimensional inkjet paintings a rudimentary stereoscopic effect applied during web browsing is transferred to the finished pieces. Anaglyphic red and cyan glasses may be worn to perceive the finished paintings as atmospheric 3D compositions. For this exhibition, Enxuto and Love are showing versions of paintings from the Frick Collection which form a counter-archive of open source abstraction.