American Artists Reflect on Trust Issues for Ronchini Gallery Show
A new group exhibition based on the inherent fallacy of today's mass media will be taking place Ronchini Gallery Sept 16th - November 18th.
Trust Issues features new work by the American artists: Arielle Falk, Samuel Levi Jones, Augustus Nazzaro, Rachel Rossin and Rose Salane, all of which are being exhibited at Ronchini Gallery for the first time.
The artists in Trust Issues upend, confuse or question the integrity of different reproducible medias—from traditional books to website imagery—altering intended meanings through different modes of abstraction. But beware: there are no simple allegories amongst these artworks, only a constant dissection of visual media. Because when everyone’s guilty by association, who can you trust?
Arielle Falk finds and prints stock images of paradise—usually pictures of idyllic, unpopulated beaches—as large banners, which she then weathers with a heat gun. The pictures, which usually serve as backdrops for inspirational or seductive advertisements, are here rendered as artifice/artefact through their time-worn appearance, which subtly undercuts their intended usage.
Sam Levi Jones sources out-dated encyclopaedias, law books or other institutional collections of information, violently removes their covers, and then sews them together to create abstract compositions that hover somewhere between rigorous minimalist grids and chance forms of Abstract Expressionism. In a meaningful act of defiance against these culturally and racially biased tomes, Jones renders these outmoded books useless. Yet he proceeds to turn them into something beautiful that mindfully alters art history’s predominantly white lineage of 20th century abstraction.
Augustus Nazzaro makes virtuosic paintings that mimic the aesthetics of classified and potentially explosive media. His images of secret locations, hidden logos and masked documents are created with a laborious process of painting, sanding and repainting ad nauseam with precision detail. The effect is reminiscent of Xeroxed Zines, microfiche and infrared imaging, in other words, a visual language of subterfuge.
Rose Salane creates sculptures that fill in the blanks around fragments of information, stories, or conversations encountered in the public places where she happens to be creating. She fabricates newspaper clippings as means to inform her objects, which in turn, often become the protagonists of the stories she invents. Together they forge a delicate balance between idea and object, while showing us that we’re never quite getting the “full” story.
Rachel Rossin uses both virtual reality and painting to investigate the slippage between the real and the digital. She combines Internet sources like video games and stock computer illustrations with objects from her real life such as a vase of flowers or a childhood drawing. The images in her paintings are further abstracted by computer programmes that twist the inherent meaning of these seductive Internet renderings; which are mostly geared toward garnering clicks and game plays.
Curator Ryan Steadman (b. 1974, Greenville, S.C, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He was educated at the Pratt Institute, New York and The University of Georgia, USA. Selected curatorial background includes: RE(a)D, Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York (2015), Save It For Later, Sothey's S|2 gallery, New York (2014), Ain’tings, Robert Blumenthal Gallery, New York (2014), So Different, So Appealing, with Rachel Churner, 50 Gramercy Park North, New York (2011), What’s Bin Did and What’s Been Hid, and 106 Green Gallery, Brooklyn (2009). In 2013 Steadman was appointed curatorial advisor to the UNTITLED Art Fair in Miami Beach and has written art reviews for artforum.com, The New York Observer and Modern Painters, among other publications.
Trust Issues
16 September - 18 November 2016
Opening Reception Thursday, 15 September 2016, 6 - 8pm
Monday-Friday 10am – 6pm, Saturday 12pm – 5pm
22 Dering Street, London W1S 1AN
Tel: +44 (0)20 7629 9188
www.ronchinigallery.com
IMAGE: Samuel Levi Jones, Expendable, 2015-2016, deconstructed encyclopedias on canvas and wood, 56 x 67 in, courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery
