Misappropriation Exhibition Opens During the Art Los Angeles Contemporary Art Fair

 

 Sarah 04.11.10, archival pigment print on paper, mounted on aluminum 48" x 48"

Artists Ray Beldner, Brendan Lott, Sonja Schenk, and Annie Seaton are pleased to announce their upcoming exhibition, Misappropriation. The pop-up show, which takes place during the Art Los Angeles Contemporary Art Fair, includes paintings, mixed media, digital prints, and small-scale installation all using and misusing found photo-based imagery. The exhibition will be on display at Studio Orange in Culver City, California from January 23-30, 2011.

Since the early collages of Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp’s use of found object for his series of “ready-mades,” artists have felt free to use, reproduce, appropriate and incorporate materials found within popular culture and society. These raw materials reflect and embrace the world around us: snippets of newspapers and magazines, film and TV excerpts, snapshots, advertisements, news headlines, bits of text, characters, fragments of song, and so on. Artists used this source material just as artists have used raw material for thousands of years. 

Now with the ubiquity of computers, digital cameras and the Internet, artists have access to the world’s greatest libraries, image databases, and interactive tools at their fingertips. As a result, traditional artistic practice is changing once again as artists explore the potential of these new technologies and incorporate them into their working methodologies. For each of these artists, the Internet and digital technology play a vital role in their creative processes.

Appropriation as an artistic practice and visual strategy is not new to contemporary artists, but the case that this exhibition makes is that the Internet enables a new kind of appropriation or borrowing, a “mis-appropriation” which is the intentional—sometimes humorous, sometimes dark—misuse of someone else's material. In this case, their images or their likenesses.

Each artist in the show collages images they have taken or found on the Internet or elsewhere, and they re-purpose and re-contextualize them in a way that reflects on their origins. They are in a sense “meta-images” misappropriated for the purpose, in part, to reflect on the picture’s original purpose and meaning.

Studio Orange, January 23 to January 30, 2011

Reception: Saturday, January 29 2011, 6-9pm

Studio Orange is located at:
8526 Washington Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232  
Gallery Hours : By Appointment Only

Contact:

Annie Seaton   p: 310.621.5847   e: annie@annieseatonart.com

Ray Beldner   p: 415.297.2319   e: ray@raybeldner.com

New Work

From the series: Portraits 101

Each of these portraits was created from the first 101 images I found on Google when searching each subject's name. In Photoshop, I converted the individual jpegs to 1% opacity and layered them one upon the other until a kind of abstract and subtle "uber-portrait" emerged. The portraits are time-based since each Google search, done on a certain day, will always yield a unique result. The titles of the works include the date when I accessed the images that comprise each portrait.

Pope 04.28.10, 2010

archival pigment print on paper, mounted on aluminum

48" x 48" unique work, one A/P

Britney 03.01.10, 2010

archival pigment print on paper, mounted on aluminum

48" x 48" unique work, one A/P

Barack 03.02.10, 2010

archival pigment print on paper, mounted on aluminum

48" x 48" unique work, one A/P

Sarah 04.11.10, 2010

archival pigment print on paper, mounted on aluminum

48" x 48" unique work, one A/P

Tiger 04.10.10, 2010
archival pigment print on paper, mounted on aluminum
48" x 48" unique work, one A/P

Michael 03.01.10, 2010
archival pigment print on paper, mounted on aluminum
48" x 48" unique work, one A/P

 Rush 04.28.10, 2010
archival pigment print on paper, mounted on aluminum
48" x 48" unique work, one A/P
 

Exhibition Review

Check out this online review by James Scarborough for the Los Angeles show, "In the Realm of the Lenses" at Stephen Cohen Gallery

 

Lecture, Sacramento

"Cash, Porn and Theft: How I Make My Art"
6pm, Thursday, March 18

 Ray Beldner, Incant, 2008, Cast plaster, paint, gold leaf, ink transfer, 16" x 32" x 54" 

Sixth Annual Festival of the Arts
California State University, Sacramento
March 17-20, 2010

Please join me!

Group Exhibition, Los Angeles

Ray Beldner, Old School, 2004, Archival pigment print on Somerset paper, 48” x 39", edition of 3 

 

This exhibition, guest curated by Tulsa Kinney and Paige Wery, Artillery Magazine's editor and publisher respectively, explores sexuality employed by artists using photography-based work. The artists listed alphabetically include: Ray Beldner, Kim Crum, Marta Edmisten, Gerald Förster, Gordon Magnin, Johnny Naked, Naida Osline, Christopher Russell, Austin Young and Carrie Yury.

"PHOTO ARTILLERY: In the Realm of the Lenses,"

Stephen Cohen Gallery

7358 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Runs January 15 through February 19, 2010