LONDON.- Ronchini Gallery is presenting Trust Issues, a group exhibition curated by Ryan Steadman featuring new work by the American artists: Arielle Falk, Samuel Levi Jones, Augustus Nazzaro, Rachel Rossin and Rose Salane, all of which are being exhibited at Ronchini Gallery for the first time.
Trust Issues is a show about the inherent fallacy of today’s mass media.
Before the Information Age, the media was seen as an objective think tank that nevertheless ignored viewpoints outside its jurisdiction—as well as minority viewpoints within it. The internet, and social media in particular, exposed the factional nature of these institutions, and the media as we'd known it was splintered into thousands of partisan players who were forced to become servile to monetary interests. These biases are more transparent than ever, but the public is often left with more information than they’re prepared to digest.
News hits that a paper owned by a political radical is secretly funded by a toxic industrial giant. Knowing that, can you still feel good about reading your favourite sex column in that newspaper?
The artists in Trust Issues upend, confuse or question the integrity of different reproducible medias—from traditional books to website imagery—altering intended meanings through different modes of abstraction. But beware: there are no simple allegories amongst these artworks, only a constant dissection of visual media. Because when everyone’s guilty by association, who can you trust?
Arielle Falk finds and prints stock images of paradise—usually pictures of idyllic, unpopulated beaches—as large banners, which she then weathers with a heat gun. The pictures, which usually serve as backdrops for inspirational or seductive advertisements, are here rendered as artifice/artefact through their time-worn appearance, which subtly undercuts their intended usage.
Samuel Levi Jones sources out-dated encyclopaedias, law books or other institutional collections of information, violently removes their covers, and then sews them together to create abstract compositions that hover somewhere between rigorous minimalist grids and chance forms of Abstract Expressionism. In a meaningful act of defiance against these culturally and racially biased tomes, Jones renders these outmoded books useless. Yet he proceeds to turn them into something beautiful that mindfully alters art history’s predominantly white lineage of 20th century abstraction.
Augustus Nazzaro makes virtuosic paintings that mimic the aesthetics of classified and potentially explosive media. His images of secret locations, hidden logos and masked documents are created with a laborious process of painting, sanding and repainting ad nauseam with precision detail. The effect is reminiscent of Xeroxed Zines, microfiche and infrared imaging, in other words, a visual language of subterfuge.
Rose Salane creates sculptures that fill in the blanks around fragments of information, stories, or conversations encountered in the public places where she happens to be creating. She fabricates newspaper clippings as means to inform her objects, which in turn, often become the protagonists of the stories she invents. Together they forge a delicate balance between idea and object, while showing us that we’re never quite getting the “full” story.
Rachel Rossin uses both virtual reality and painting to investigate the slippage between the real and the digital. She combines Internet sources like video games and stock computer illustrations with objects from her real life such as a vase of flowers or a childhood drawing. The images in her paintings are further abstracted by computer programmes that twist the inherent meaning of these seductive Internet renderings; which are mostly geared toward garnering clicks and game plays.
