Curator’s Statement
By Paula Burleigh
Positioning the Real: The Authentic Artifice
Art engenders a delicate balance, and occasionally a violent tension, between what is real what is artifice. Since the groundbreaking inclusion of newspaper elements into the Cubist collages of Picasso and Braque in the early 20th century, artists have pushed the boundaries of representation toward the space of the real.
In the latter half of the century, the relationship between the real and the artifice of representation became increasingly complicated. By the end of the 20th century, the old adage “art imitates life” came to be inverted, and theorists like Jean Baudrillard noted that representation now structures reality. In the visual arts, photography recorded this transit as it made its way from “fine art” to media used to present meticulously constructed images that masquerade as the real, meant to question our assumptions about the world around us.
This exhibition of recent work by the talented students of the Cleveland Institute of Art examines how artists working in a “post-postmodern” moment plumb the liminal space between reality and representation. Working within these interstices, they raise relevant and challenging questions within the context of contemporary culture.
Each of these artists engages an art historical precedent, yet departs from it in unique ways. Employing diverse visual and conceptual strategies to achieve their ends, the resulting heterogeneity aptly reflects the current state of art. Uri Davillier, for instance, through his sculptural juxtapositions of blown glass and found industrial materials, generates a psychic tension between the connotations of the “real” associated with his found materials and the new meanings produced by his re-contextualization of those elements within his sculptures.
An interest in relational meaning is also evident in the work of Ryan Serafin, who conceives of each of his works as part of a larger system in which the meaning of one element is contingent upon its relationship to the greater whole.
Moving from the abstract to the figurative, Jerry Birchfield explores the possibility of creating a hybrid environment of synthetic and natural elements. His photographs of a person clad in a metal suit range from a straightforward documentary style to an exercise in digital manipulation.
Andy Warhol’s implosion of the gap between the world of “high art” and mass culture is channeled in this exhibition by Shoko Yamamura, who unapologetically transforms herself into a brand. She departs from the Warholian model in that her motives are altruistic and her aesthetic is handmade.
The photographs by Sarah Balch explore the relationship between the real and the artifice within the cultural context of celebrity impersonators. The psychological depth conveyed in her frontal portraits recalls Warhol’s screen tests.
Artists:
Curator: Paula Burleigh