FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Silver Shed 119 WEST 25TH STREET PH NEW YORK NY 10001 TEL +1 646 322 3324 FAX +1 212 929 4038 WWW.THESILVERSHED.ORG info@thesilvershed.org

DIGITAL WITH MONUMENT	OPENING SATURDAY, JUNE 14, 6:00 – 9:00 PM
Digital With Monument takes its name from the seminal East Village gallery, International With Monument, founded by three artists in 1984. In the early ’80s, International With Monument distinguished itself from the prevailing Downtown ethos, characterized by neo-expressionist bohemianism, through its conceptual rigor and critical irony. Artists such as Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Haim Steinbach, Sarah Charlesworth, Laurie Simmons, and Ashley Bickerton, among others, had pivotal exhibitions there. Inspired by IWM’s prescient market politics and aesthetics, Digital With Monument looks at ways in which digital thinking manifests and operates in aesthetic practices today—and the range of effects being produced by various digital methods and techniques. Collectively, the works in this show posit the prevailing digital influence upon contemporary art practice, whether visually evident or not. Sharing some form or technique of digital montage, each of the works evoke a sense of ungrounded spatiality. In particular, many of the works are illuminated by technological interfaces. For example, in Yunhee Min’s digital video—a translation of Michael Snow’s Wavelength—the technological apparatus functions as material, generating a bursting perceptual field. Patrick Meagher’s ‘desktop landscape’ series mobilizes the globalized Graphic User Interface and iconography of personal computers, smartphones and web buttons in a send up of online desire and play with a Koolhaasian research on the culture of shopping. The rendered 3D spaces in Craig Kalpakjian’s work are themselves akin to a kind of digitality—at once visually inhabitable, while being impenetrable and out of reach. And in Johannes Hueppi’s paintings, a potentially dystopic digital space is reflected on a body bathed in the glow of a computer screen, rendering one’s digital publicity as unsettling. As Martha Rosler offers on the differences between montage versus collage, montage suggests the additional critical dimension of time as related to the reading of space and forming of social spaces. Accordingly, the notion of the Monument here is proposed as an interface of implied space. The visual cues of screen iconography define dislocated space and disjunctive time rather than corporeal time. Alternating attention between communication tools and physical space, the interface itself becomes another space of departure to various realities. In Steve Robinson’s work, scholars’ rocks merge in and out of a masked spatial picture plane via layers of vectorized post-pixel blob-jects, adding a digital future of texture and pearlescence. Similarly, implied pixilation and transparent layerings are particular effects through which Oliver Lanz explores spatiality in his own paintings. Alfred Steiner’s humorous post-abject digital-montage canvases pose an aberrant reality, past surrealism into a digitally enabled hybridized space. Outside, on the roof, Steiner’s lupine watchdog/predator/surveillor looms as a metaphor of human/animal nature and admonition to overcome pack and heard mentalities or digital group-thinking tendencies, and to remember to look up to and seek the merits of independent thinking—if formerly seen as only distanced lone-wolf agency—as latent Beuysian realities. Silver Shed is open Tuesdays through Fridays, from 12:00 – 6:00 pm, and by appointment. Silver Shed is an artist-run, indoor-outdoor contemporary art project-space in New York. The opening project consists of three shows spanning seven months, featuring twenty-five internationally active artists. Organized as an opportunity for discussion, the project explores the digital landscape as a central paradigm of 21st century consciousness.
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Johannes Hueppi Craig Kalpakjian Oliver Lanz Patrick Meagher Yunhee Min Steve Robinson Alfred Steiner