through August 17th 2013
"[C]onsider how difficult it is to visualize networks, which, in their incomprehensible scale, ranging from the impossibly small microchip to the impossibly vast global Internet, truly embody the contemporary sublime." (David Joselit)
Rod Barton is pleased to present 'ROPE BURN: Painting Behind the Velveteen Curtain', an exhibition featuring works by an international group of emerging artists: Maiken Bent, Alfred Boman, Alex Da Corte, Parker Ito, and Roman Liška. The artists joined together in this exhibition share a common sensibility regarding image-making rooted in the aesthetics of contemporary consumer culture. Key to this process is the notion of a remediation of content and material - be it in the quoting of tribal-tattoo-like shapes in Alfred Boman's frivolously colorful paintings, the visually chaotic and camp digital collages of Parker Ito, shrill patterning in the modified readymade sculpture by Roman Liška, Maiken Bent´s secretly kinky assemblages, or the integration of a fellow contemporary artist's work in Alex Da Corte's installation on view. The shared concerns with contemporary culture and its overdetermined aesthetic, perhaps as an attempt at salvaging what has become a primary source of inspiration to all of these young artists, appears to have been the driving force for the production of the mongrels on display, which are neither paintings nor sculptures proper. The speculative appropriation of imagery, shapes, and attitudes originally located in a particular cultural sphere and temporality gets dislocated, taken out of context, mashed up with other stylistic elements of varying origins, and thus allows for a fresh view on these formerly marginal aesthetic languages that have gained traction in the discourse around contemporary art and culture once again.
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