NEW YORK.- The Public Art Fund opened the exhibit Jacob Dyrenforth: Stand-Ins for the All Time Greatest on view in "The World is Round" MetroTech Center, Brooklyn through September 9, 2007. The World is Round features new commissions and recent works by Jacob Dyrenforth,

Brooklyn-based artist Jacob Dyrenforth's wide-ranging artistic output examines the ways in which elements of contemporary life become universal common denominators and touchstones, focusing in particular on cinematic tropes, the phenomena of rock superstardom and fandom, and countercultural incidents as they are represented in widespread photojournalistic imagery. His sculptural installations are replicas of culturally resonant tableaux, featuring an array of props that are constructed with purposeful artifice in order to draw attention to the familiar and easily overlooked.

Stand-Ins for the All-Time Greatest resembles a rock concert in the moments just before a show, when guitars are tuned and propped on stands until the band arrives onstage, as the crowd waits in anticipation. Dyrenforth's guitars, which are made of foam and other movie or theatrical prop materials, are clearly stand-ins for the real thing. But music buffs will easily recognize them as depictions of specific makes and models of guitars, including a Fender Stratocaster, a Gibson SG, a Fender Telecaster and others. They represent the signature instruments of ten musicians whose names Dyrenforth compiled from an assortment of internet top-ten lists of the greatest guitar players of all time. Using the most minimal visual clues—basic shapes and just a few added design details—he creates a work that explores the universal appeal of rock-and-roll culture, as well as its online proliferation. The guitars and the stage they are placed on—a pristine minimalist platform with a mirrored surface—together function as a blank screen onto which the viewer can project his or her own narrative.

Dyrenforth was born in 1975 in Cincinnati. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1998) and an MFA from the Columbia University School of the Arts (2003). His solo exhibitions include Some get strong, some get strange, Sandroni Rey, Los Angeles; The Yearn, Wallspace, New York (2006) and Vice. And Versa, 31 Grand Gallery, New York (2005).