Two of Europes most prominent, and also most handsome, international curators invite you to view work by 10 artists.
The curators have selected ten artists with burgeoning international profiles. Rather than construct a group exhibition that provides content through juxtaposition of artworks, they have chosen to forefront and alter traditional modernist methods and tactics for display. They propose reflection on exchange, display, storage and curatorial practice itself.
Every 48 hours one of the artworks will be taken from the sprawling, chaotic storage racking in the gallery's rear space, and displayed alone in the main exhibition space at the front of the gallery. The other twenty or so artworks remain suspended inside the specifically produced environment, a context installed by Graham Hudson, where the various videos, photographs, objects and projections, simultaneously whir and play or sit quietly. After its two days in the white cubed foreground, the selected piece is de-selected and returned to its starting point, and another work takes its place. This process continues over the month until each work has been shown once in isolation.
When presented alone the content of the artwork remains extraneous to the exhibition as a whole, and when stored en mass the content is merged and diluted into the body of the "Group Exhibition". This system is both elegant and awkward, and provides the viewer with numerous potential experiences of the show and resists initial reading of a "theme" focusing instead on the underlying structure. This echoes Hudson's graceful and lumpen sculptural installation, which provides a visual overload of items dragged into the space from the locality, selected by the artist to provide a mechanism to display other's work, using items from his pre-existing vocabulary.
Olivier Babin (b. 1975 France)
Elisa Pone (b. 1979 France)
Alban Hajdinaj (b. 1974 Albania)
Benoit Maire (b. 1978 France)
Rosa Barba (b. 1972 Italy)
Ana Prvacki (b. 1976 New York / Singapore)
Peter Liversidge (b. 1973 UK)
Lovett Codagnone (b. 1962 / 1967 USA)
caraballo-farman (Argentina, Iran, Canada)
Alexander Heim (b. 1977 Germany)
&
Graham Hudson (b. 1977 UK)
Dave Hoyland and SEVENTEEN would like to thank the curators of this exhibition who would like to remain anonymous.
WE LIKE WHAT YOU EAT is a micro survey exhibition investigating a specific set of tendencies in the practice of a selected group of North American contemporary video artists.
The appropriation of pre-existing mainstream entertainment media is the dominant refrain in the work of the artists featured in this exhibition. The internet, in particular video streaming websites such as YouTube, as well as television programs, advertisements, music videos and cinema serve Paul B. Davis, the duo Javier Morales + John Michael Boling and Eric Fensler with an abundant territory from which they draw both their inspiration and subject matter.
In terms of exposure, the art gallery has been matched and perhaps even surpassed in importance by the website itself as an artistic platform for the included artists. In exact accordance with this relocation, there is no singular or predictable audience for their work and that of its ilk; from high school computer geeks to international curators - the fascinated take no dogmatic form.
Immediate, humorous, inventive and, above all, relevant - the artists in WE LIKE WHAT YOU EAT stand as the selected representatives of a much larger movement which, while having an international span, nonetheless maintains its spiritual centre in the United States of America.
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Paul B. Davis [BEIGE] is a DJ, educator and data artist as well as being a founder member, alongside Cory Archangel, of the programming ensemble BEIGE. He had his first solo show at SEVENTEEN in 2007 and will present a solo booth at the SEVENTEEN stand at the NEXT Art Fair in Chicago, April 2008. He presents one of his trademark YouTube hacks - glitchy, pixilated visual mash-ups constructed via the manipulation of the compositional data contained within a number of standard video clips taken from the website
Javier Morales + John Michael Boling first collaborated together as fellow students at the University of Georgia. Their collective oeuvre is here represented by two key video collaborations, The Church of The Future (2006) and Body Magic (2006); both television re-edit works that are mystical, musical and indeterminately potent. Together Morales and Boling run the website 53 o's (www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com) and program the video blog Channel 53.
Eric Fensler's diverse creative output is beyond singular classification - comprising television re-edits, cartoon re-cuts/re-voicings, Polaroid photography, music videos and network television screen writing. For the exhibition he presents a number of video works including the much lauded GI JOE PSA series - manipulated versions of the public service announcements that accompanied the end of each episode of the cult toy franchise's popular children's television cartoon.
A series of evening screenings of related video material from each of the artists will accompany this exhibition. Please contact the gallery for more information regarding these events and the exhibition in general
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WE LIKE WHAT YOU EAT is the inaugural exhibition at SEVENTEENs new basement exhibition space - curated by Paul Pieroni. In late May SEVENTEEN will follow this exhibition with the first major survey of the British Scratch Video phenomenon (1983/6).
SCRATCH! will run from the 28/05/08 to the 25/06/08.
