Brand New Gallery presents Mediated images, a group shows with woks by Matthew Brandt, Joshua Citarella, Jessica Eaton, James Hoff, Chris Wiley and Letha Wilson.

The artists in the show push the boundaries of contemporary photography experimenting new ways to use it. Photography is not anymore confined to the two-dimensional machine-dependent realm, but processes and techniques from various disciplines are juxtaposed and layered on top of each other, creating hybridized end products that defy easy categorization.

Matthew Brandt show four works from the series Burnout. ‘Burnout’ is a commonly used term in the textile industry to describe a process for treating velvet fabrics with acid. Photographs of people’s torsos are acid etched in silk velvet, becoming bodies in fabric. In the Burnout works, the organic material erodes; rips and tears emerge in the process. An integral part of the work is that all of the pieces will change over time, as we all will. A photograph will always inevitably fade, and these works hold the same amount of fragility. There is poetry in the point when an image becomes a texture.

In Hourglass in Lattice Configuration V & VI Joshua Citarella utilizes new techniques of photographic image production. Each rectangle of the grid is stitched together by hand through image compositing, copy and pasted together to form a field within which to compose disparate images and materials. Scaled to the body, at the dimensions of a domestic household door, the bars prevent the viewers entry into represented space. Beneath these bars images coming from various aspects of his practice, appropriated images from the web shown next to straight studio photographs of chemical reactions which ostensibly appear to be digitally rendered images. Natural materials becomes barometers for truth. Absent of most cultural references, they function as a metric by which to evaluate the realism and descriptive capacity of today’s new photograph-with-software image.

Jessica Eaton presents two-works from the series XPOL. XPOL stands for “cross polarization”, the scientific method by which the photographs are made. Jessica accomplishes this process by first photographing plastics in her studio with a large format camera. She then negotiates the film through a polarizing filtration system between the camera and light source to produce the final image.

In the works by James Hoff, digital images of blank canvas and monochromatic support surfaces are infected by a computer virus and the distorted images are then realized as new paintings through a dye sublimation process. The infection process produces color and form, an abstract array of thin dashes and lines embedded within the coating on the aluminum substrate. The resulting works extend the definitions of conceptual art offering new models for the consideration of art and art making.

The works by Chris Wiley are “fully integrated objects” where the frame, differently for each work, becomes fundamental. The works in the show are called Dingbats, which is a term that was coined to describe a kind of low-end faux Modernist architecture that proliferated in Southern California and the South West in the 1950s and 60s, and also a pictographic font often used as a placeholder. As a nod to the architectural environment in which they were created, the frames are covered in low end materials used for building and interior décor, like brightly colored stucco, Formica, industrial carpet, and the like.

 

Matthew Brandt (Los Angeles, 1982) lives and works in Los Angeles.

Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at the Columbus Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah; his works has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Aspen Art Museum, the International Center of Photography, New York. The artist’s work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Cincinnati Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Royal Danish Library, National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others.

 

Joshua Citarella (New York, 1987) lives and works in New York.

Recent exhibitions of his work include Under Construction: New Positions in American Photography at Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam (FOAM) and MOCAtv Presents: A Jogging Screening at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He is organizer of the .PSDshow.org (2012–), an ongoing online exhibition of freely downloadable Photoshop files, and is a member of the artist Tumblr project The Jogging.

 

Jessica Eaton (Regina, Saskatchewan 1977) lives and works in Montreal.

Recent shows include her solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. She was featured in the 2012 Daegu Photography Biennial and the 2011 Quebéc Triennial.

 

James Hoff (Fort Wayne, Indiana 1975) lives and works in New York.

Upcoming solo shows at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, His work has been featured in a two-person exhibition at Kunsthall Oslo, and was included in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, The Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI and The Power Plant, Toronto. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at IMO, Copenhagen, Printed Matter, Foxy Production, Lisa Cooley and Bureau, all New York, as well as at Air De Paris in Paris.

 

Chris Wiley (New York, 1981) lives and works in New York.

He is a regular contributor to Frieze, ArtForum.com, and Kaleidoscope. He has worked on numerous exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, was an assistant curator on the 8th Gwangju Biennial, and served as a curatorial advisor and head catalog writer for “The Encyclopedic Palace” at the 55th Venice Biennale. His work has been presented in recent exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Torontol, at MoMA PS1, New York, Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, Hauser & Wirth in New York, Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris.

 

Letha Wilson (Honolulu, 1976) lives and works in New York.

Her works has been exhibited at the Essl Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, Exit Art, ARKO Art Center and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. Recent solo exhibitions include: Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam; Light- work, Syracuse; Brand New Gallery, Milan; Higher Pictures, New York; Christophe Gaillard, Paris.