Dorsch Gallery is pleased to present Kyle Trowbridge's solo exhibition, The Politics of Time. Trowbridge presents technology, the way it has permeated all levels of social interaction, as an uncharted problem. In his paintings, the old and new uncomfortably co-exist.
For several years Trowbridge has been investigating how technology alters the dynamics of inter-human relationships. His grand new paintings are at once abstract geometric paintings and functioning Quick Response (QR) codes. They are about 8 feet square. Their appearance, paint handling and palette reference canons of abstract geometric painting, such as Gerhard Richter's Color Chart paintings (1966-), Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43), Hans Hoffman's later abstract paintings and Josef Albers' Homage to a Square (1965). On the other hand, these colorful paintings, once scanned with the proper application, yield a text written by the artist. Usually one sees these QR codes, the next generation of barcodes, on product packaging and promotion materials. Scanning the black and white squares with a QR application on a smart phone can link the user to websites, text, and other kinds of data at a remote source. The hallmark of a QR code is an equal sized square within a square, repeated three times in the lower left, upper left and upper right corners of a larger square. With the frame established, a computer can read, in a zigzagged and zoned pattern, the binary code contained within it.
Trowbridge presents technology, the way it has permeated all levels of social interaction, as an uncharted problem. In his paintings, the old and new uncomfortably co-exist. He writes, "while my aesthetic choices pay homage to these great masters, these paintings are by no way caught in the past. There is one great departure from their work. These paintings speak. Not just on a sublime level that many of the abstract masters sought to achieve, but on a literal level. Staying true to my usual modus operandi - I am interested in creating works that look one way and behave another. A wolf in sheep's clothing if you will. Using these QR codes as a foundation not only supplies a solid geometric abstraction to paint from, but provides me with a scannable code that can house a phrase or idiom that I pen. This in turn allows the viewer to interact with my paintings in the classic sense of art viewing, on a purely aesthetic level; or in a physically interactive manner in which the use of their smart phones as scanners will reveal the "word art" embedded within." The fast reading of the painting, that of the word art one can connect to digitally, interrupts the impulse to read the paintings art historically, against the aspects of mid-century abstract painting. Words intrude on a mindscape pondering the visual impact of contrasting squares of saturated color. They are like blaring highway signs for South of the Border against the subtle Carolina landscape. This dissonant juxtaposition suggests loss; what our plugged-in society gains in our hyper connectivity we lose much more - our ability to think. But the nostalgic reading is perhaps too simplistic. The confrontational language in Trowbridge's words re-iterates that. We can take these paintings as a stark demonstration of what we are grappling with. This technology is here to stay; in enlisting new tools to mash-up visual experience, we have to develop a new vocabulary to investigate their impact.
Trowbridge is a native Floridian who lives and works in Miami. He is also a full-time professor at the University of Miami. His work has been exhibited internationally in Toronto, Santo Domingo, New York, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles and the Vienna Biennale. Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport have works by Trowbridge in their collections. His large-scale word art installation, Site of Temporarily Invested Interest, was included in a group exhibition of installations at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale in Summer 2011.
Dorsch Gallery is pleased to present Magnus Sigurdarson's solo exhibition, 1001 Dreams of Occupation: What's in it for me?.
The attempt to reach out to the Other over and over and over again despite preordained failure defines Sigurdarson's emphatically allegorical work.
For 1001 Dreams of Occupation: What's in it for me?, Miami-based Magnus Sigurdarson investigates ways to situate himself in the implications of The Arab Spring, since, he proposes, the strength of protests in the Middle East have made its participants less exotic, less Other. He does so with two videos of one-man protests; a rotating camel sculpture appropriated from a bakery sign; stills from his protest performances; and drawings of French colonial postcards of Arabia.
Sigurdarson exposes his own vulnerability in discrete acts, each of them acknowledging the pathos of his (and our) being. In doing so, he pierces through the illusion that any of us know what we are doing. He has lived seven years as an Icelander in Miami, FL, a multicultural city with a significant Latin contingent, and, notably, a population that are mostly immigrants from places around the country and the globe. Miami, then, is a city of displacement, of people whose hearts and imaginations are always tied, no matter the emotion behind this connection, to another place. With a self-deprecating sense of humor, Sigurdarson played out the dimensions of his heightened awareness of both being "Other" and encountering the Other in his characters as the marooned Icelander on South Beach, the English Beefeater man in the streets of London, or a Union soldier on an Indian battlefield.
Like a man constantly returning to the site of the most unresolved and tangled emotions, he continues to seek out ways to encounter, embody and/or connect to the Other. In his epochal essay "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," Craig Owens wrote that about the many nuances and structures of allegory in contemporary art, including obsessive neuroses, ceaseless accumulation of fragments and the desire to preserve the ephemeral. In all these ways Sigurdarson deploys allegory, to the extent that he piles up fragments of allegories. Furthermore, Sigurdarson deploys allegory to seek connection with the Other of the past, far away and/or of another culture. The attempt to reach out to the Other over and over and over again despite preordained failure defines Sigurdarson's emphatically allegorical work. In the works in this exhibition, Sigurdarson elides and conflates his own imaginings of multiple Arabias with images and experiences gleaned from the news coverage of the Arab Spring and Occupy movements of this past year. Using an etch-a-sketch like technique on the computer, Sigurdarson traced blown-out projections of early 19th century picture postcards of a French colonialist artist's vision of "Arabia." These fantastical pictures of nomads holding their camels were fabricated objects of desire for the Western tourist. Sigurdarson's layered interventions in the images reiterate the distance between the viewer and the subject. In their time the images were a demonstration of what we now call Orientalism. Sigurdarson's appropriation of them exaggerates the distances bridged by the most typical use of allegory - bridging the present to the past and also the Western subject with the (Eastern and exotic) Other.
In a video called Occupy My Innocence - Opa Locka Train Station Sigurdarson wields various handwritten signs reading "Occupy my Dreams" and "What's In It for Me?" (among other slogans) as he stands alone in front of the Opa Locka train station, a 1920s revivalist work of Moorish architecture. Still an active building, the city hall is a vestige of Glen Curtiss's thematic development of Opa Locka, a city in greater Miami with the largest concentration of Moorish architecture in the United States. An economically motivated allegory, the fantasy behind the architecture was meant to be an attraction for investors and future residents. Embellishing the emotional depth of his performance, Sigurdarson chose Ravel's Bolero as a soundtrack.
Through his different characters in the video, Sigurdarson acts out, he says, "many of the different spirits behind Occupy, yet the characters, they are all me. I go to different depths of myself to find them." With its disjunctive elements, Sigurdarson's lonely protest is akin to the lack of a central message in the Occupy protests. Each successive protest can be seen as an active re-reading of the others before it.
In these protests, social media played a vital role in the nearly instantaneous transmission of images and messages. The platform removed the distance that allegory is meant to bridge. The protesters everywhere were less Other because of this removal of geographical and temporal distance. In addition, when seen on the screen, in the privacy of looking at one's own phone or computer, we all have a little more courage. This was a hearts then minds and body offensive in which the currency of images and their captions, or the captions in them, had the most power to persuade. Now, Sigurdarson states, "What is happening in the Arabic world represents a paradigm shift. We can no longer talk about them as the 'Other' now, because we want them to be our friends."
Sigurdarson carefully elides elements from the protests in recent history. A lone protester, he plays out a Jungian prototype - David against Goliath. At the same time, his singularly re-presents the immensity of each protester. Still, he states, "I am a passive-aggressive occupier." His dissection of the aspects of these phenomena is very indirect; there is no direct message. The allegories and comparisons never end.
Craig Owens' essay is also intensely allegorical; the text is dense with exegesis, commentary and quotations (all of these are appropriated fragments), properties that Owens likens to allegory by way of Walter Benjamin. In this way, Sigurdarson's fragmented allegories form a similar text.
In One Thousand and One Nights, Sigurdarson muses, the structure of the story, a dream within a dream within a dream and so on, was born of the storyteller's will to survive. Her very existence was based on the fact that the king had condemned her to death when her story ended. The story became more about the ability to continue telling than what she was relaying. The photographs and videos in 1001 Dreams of Occupation: What's In It For Me? were shot by Paul Stoppi with assistance from Carolina Gonzalez and Yann Quillien.
Magnus Sigurdarson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1966 and currently lives and works in Miami, Florida. He attended The Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, Reykjavik, Iceland (1992, BFA in Mixed Media) and Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey (1997, MFA). He is a Fulbright Scholarship Recipient with multiple grants and awards on his resume. His works are included in the collections of Debra and Dennis Scholl, Miami Beach; Alberto Chebebar, Miami Beach; Collezione La Gaia, Busca, Italy, MDD - Museum Dhondt - Dhaenes, Gent, Belgium; The Icelandic National Gallery, Reykjavik; The Reykjavik Municipal Museum, Reykjavik; The Related Group, Miami and The Private Collection of Emmanuel Javogue, Miami. Magnus Sigurdarson is represented by Dorsch Gallery, Miami.
