Post Pictures

Progress in architecture has given us total control over interior environments; climate controlled spaces smoothly connected by escalators in shopping malls, airports, hotels and casinos. Progress in the Universal Texture promises to give us a smooth and continuous 24-hour, cloudless, daylit world, increasingly free of jarring anomalies, outliers and statistical inconsistency. – Clement Valla

Snow White presents a still life based on the female body, while recalling the form of Cubism and Futurism. This virtual sculpture plays with an atmospheric treatment of light, evoking 17th century painting of floral bouquets in Northern Europe. Building a fantastical virtual totem using the detritus of consumerist culture, the composition assembles the color, texture and whimsy of early modernist painting.

Jonathan Monaghan creates sculpture and animated video installations that challenge the boundaries between the real, the imagined, and virtual. The video “Mothership” appropriates characters and objects from science fiction, advertising, videogames and art history. Funny and colorful, Monaghan’s work travels a space between Super Mario’s Rainbow Road, the landscape of German romantic painting, and the Technodrome in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Absurdly pulling together disparate populist imagery that evokes value, power and technology, it fuses luxury apartments and medical operating rooms, as well as the London skyline and a sacred cow.

Shane Mecklenburger’s interactive art game “Fortress of Solitude Tilted” disrupts the format of a first-person shooter videogame. Instead of presenting the familiar objectives found in commercial games, the artwork offers players the ability to create or destroy treasure. Using the diamond as a motif that represents value that is generated by controlled scarcity, the treasure expands and collapses at the player’s own volition.

Sara Ludy’s video montages observe the experience of light in modernist architecture. Evoking minimalism, these sites are handled coldly, and are void of people or recognizable signifiers. “Transom” is set in a Virginia shopping center; “Otha” explores a prefabricated house in the virtual world of Second Life, while “Niodrara” features a residence in Glendale, California.

Leonard’s “Crash Kiss” photography series algorithmically joins two faces in profile, suggesting romantic narrative in a way that is similar to Sherrie Levine’s 1977 “Sons and Lovers” series, which debuted in Crimp’s original Pictures exhibition.

In creating “Dark kNight” in 2012, Hart felt it was time to begin a migration out of the sanctuary cocoon of her earlier animated automatons to symbolically confront and counter misogyny. In her re-emergence, she chose an avatar to represent the attempt of a defiant automaton who not only seeks to escape one of her own eScapes, but to break free of the simulated sanctuary world behind the screen. As the title implies, the work is Hart’s response to the popular Christopher Nolan blockbuster, “The Dark Knight Rises”, a film about escape from imprisonment and the fascism that deems who is and isn’t to be imprisoned. With the film’s two highly independent, physically athletic and defiant female characters, both of whom have escaped their own entrapments, Hart was immediately prompted to envision her own restless, racially-hybrid female avatar trying out various strategies to escape virtuality. In the video we see Hart’s Dark kNight hurling herself, feet first, into the screen in an attempt to smash through it. Hart claims the mythological source for the figure, besides Nolan’s Batman, is the chained Prometheus, bound by the Olympian gods for bringing fire to humankind. Artistically she is inspired by Michaelangelo’s Dying Captives, who appear to struggle in their efforts to release themselves from their prisons of stone.

Shane Mecklenburger, "Fortress of Solitude Tilted," 2013

Photo by John Berens.

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