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ESTER PARTEGÀS
MORE WORLD
October
21 through November 27, 2010
More World, ESTER PARTEGÀS'
latest solo exhibition at Foxy Production,
plays with perceptions of excess, anxiety, pleasure, and
deprivation. More World combines wallpaper, drawings,
prints, sculpture, and video in a charged environment of color
and contrast. Nature within the city, packaging, and fast-food
provide inspiration for the artist’s ironic takes on the
psychic underpinnings of landscapes, surfaces, and
objects.
Partegàs unpacks Pop, contaminating it with trash,
removing its logos and references, and infusing it with a
corrupted photo-realism. Private and public spheres sit
uneasily together, as the artist traces the process of
consumption: from the birth of desires in marketing to the
final transformation of products into trash, the symbol of
depletion and, perhaps, death.
The
walls of the gallery are covered by the monochromatic
Wallpaper (Fences) (2010) with its repeating
photographic images of fencing and trees. The landscape is
immediately recognizable as an abandoned urban area, common to
large swathes of the post-industrial American city. For
Partegàs the fence represents the division between the
civilized and the wild, between order and disorder, and
between the clean and the tainted; unnervingly, we cannot be
sure which side of it we are on.
Studies on Mysticism (2010), a series of
iridescent candy package drawings, hang before the
black-and-white wallpaper, creating senses of both animation
and disorientation. Using airbrush and stencils - the tools of
choice of pre-digital graphic designers – Partegàs draws only
the background designs, highlighting their cosmic, almost
transcendental allusions, as if they were promising, with the
purchase of a product, a kind of celestial reward. The works’
intense coloring amplifies merchandising’s optimistic appeal,
one so often undercut later by dissatisfaction and
disillusion.
Organized Fries (2007-2010), also hung
directly onto the wallpaper, are digital prints of
arrangements of French fries on brightly colored backgrounds.
Partegàs makes the humble fry – unremarkable, almost invisible
in its ubiquity – the focus of attention, the essential
element within the visual systems she develops. She wittily
places and classifies each fry with a formal precision
reminiscent of a natural history museum exhibit.
Overcast (2010) are sculptural renderings of
outdoor potted plants that have been covered in plastic bags
to protect them from the winter weather. Their plastic
covering is their protector from the elements as well as their
oppressor – it seems to both constrict and suffocate. Cast in
polyurethane, their leaves have a bright pigmentation that
gives them an uncanny, almost surreal quality.
You Are Here (Lightbox) (2006-2010) is an
illuminated idyllic forest scene that on closer scrutiny may
not be quite what it seems: weeds sprouting in the foreground
and strange marks and printing inconsistencies reveal the
scene to be a photographic screen. The image is in fact of a
hoarding around a Chinese building site, masking its dirt and
disruption with a vision of bucolic splendor. Perception is
distorted, and flatness and depth collapse into one another as
differing levels of reality refract and
disorient.
The
silent video Ghost (2009) reflects the world through
a trash-strewn puddle on a lonely industrial street. A truck
rolls by, pigeons fly overhead, and an electronic advertising
sign changes. Ghost distils many of the themes of
More World: the odd glamour of the marginal and the
discarded, the possibilities of multiple perspectives on the
one subject, the trickiness of absolutes, and the experience
of looking with fresh eyes upon the ordinary and everyday. As
the video progresses it is clear that even the most mundane
and forgotten backstreet, the so-called “non–place”, is rife
with transformative activity.
ESTER
PARTEGÀS (La Garriga, Barcelona, 1972) lives and works in
Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA from the Universitat de
Barcelona and has completed postgraduate studies in Multimedia
at Hochschule der Kunste, Berlin. Exhibitions include:
Whitechapel Gallery, London (upcoming)(2011); Christopher
Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (solo); Socrates Sculpture
Park, Long Island City, NY; Denison Museum, Granville, OH (all
2010); Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY; Macro Future,
Depart Foundation, Rome; Foundation CaixaForum, Barcelona (all
2009); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
(2008); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
(solo); 2nd Moscow Bienniale (both 2007).
Image:
Ester Partegàs
Organized Fries
2007/10
Inkjet
Ultrachrome archival print
41-3/4 x
29-1/2 in. (105.4 x 74.9 cm.) paper size
Edition 1 of
1
Courtesy
of Foxy Production, New York
FOXY PRODUCTION
623 West
27 St
New
York, NY 10001
T +1 212
239 2758
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