October 6th — 27th, 2024
Closing event hosted by Henry Tegethoff mixing original music.
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We need not separate logos, television characters, etc. from one's individual expression as these things are as much a part of our earliest incarnations as flowers and family.
Henry Tegethoff and Julia Marks's work share a similar structure— form overrides content.
Aesthetics and intuition are foremost in their practice: Texture, color, and image are sporadically involved while pardoning the ultimate content. These artists relinquish the need to create narratives, context, or significant meaning from their work producing a silly, explosive, hyper, and occasionally teetering on the abject practice. Arbitrarily using photos, videos, and text from the internet, magazines, or objects, a meaning beyond the purpose of aesthetic quality is forgotten. And this is good. The work uses image and text as much as a medium as paint and glue itself. Their work invites a messy, awkward, and absurd process, relying on found media and artistic device.
Derivative Notes:
1 Discussing the natural irrelevance. Our artists put the work at ease, introducing no content in mind of its making or decision. Are we: to overanalyze something that was never made to extend or invite that reaction? There is no story, no implication, and no theory in the moment of each work's manifestations or thereafter. That would be an imposition on us to claim. Their work challenges our perceptions and a disagreeable search for “meaning”, connotation, or believability in work. The work purely exists. (Let us utilize critical language to ease you into a comfortability of meaninglessness. Art does not need to create meaning— it is inherent in its objecthood enough. And now, excessively and irritatingly put: We have not experienced history in full, therefore who, right now, can say what it truly means? Consider our search for meaning in work more of an institutional symptom than something necessary. This work has no direct content to share with you besides its physical manifestation and objection in space. It is simply excessive to compulsively create narratives of the context within our minds concerning the orientation of a picture or its features, most particularly when there was never one, to begin with. Nor the overreaching compensations to do so, contemporarily. Live and let live. Die and let die. It is redundant and irrelevant at large— we need not insight an intellectual violence on the mainstake of creative fronts and liberties.)
2 The language of online and contemporary image sharing. An appropriated image increasingly serves the purpose of shorthand to the non-sequentiality of anything. This form of ultramodern expression is embedded in the work. A pervasive sense of the inability to catch up to the present and integration of the content stream matches its energy and potential for expression. Energy where typical art-minded translations are reactive to the evolution of visual language— which happens hour by hour increasingly— thus feels moot by its fact of existence. We need not separate logos, television characters, etc. from one's individual expression as these things are as much a part of our earliest incarnations as flowers and family. As a retort to ‘The Pictures Generation’, a contemporary agreement of the fact and consignment of the real and the hyperreal becoming indistinguishable for all at this point. A happily confused expression. We no longer choose images that have made our identities but choose them to express ourselves. Marks and Tegethoff are two fine examples of contemporary artists in the long tail of the Pictures Generation, exalting their influence but working in the demands of the present— the reversal of image and media dictation turns into self-expression. Thus, a proliferation of the former note. Let us extend our arms to the irrelevance and deliberations of an unknowing, unplanned, and yet deeply positive way of working.
Practice as meddling......