Build A Fire

July 18 - August 8 (contact for hours)
Opening Reception: July 18, 5pm

Addressing issues of contemporary art production, Build A Fire presents work by young artists influenced by the presence of technology as well as the media that it delivers. The works incorporate this influence into their very material makeup, as a reference point taken as an inescapable given.  This sort of comfort with digital media leaves the artists free to address their own topics, and accounts for the diverse, seemingly discontinuous dialogue between the works. Keeping connections with the past, Build A Fire looks for ways to identify itself with the present.

Drawing from media that exists in his immediate personal surroundings, such as drawings and music produced by his mentally ill mother, Jacolby Satterwhite creates paintings, videos and installations that examine African American male patriarchy, sexuality, and material culture. In Model It Jacolby films himself "vogueing", a dance popular in the underground inner-city gay culture, to one of his mother's songs. While addressing complex themes of sexuality, the video echoes the aesthetics of the amateur music and video production often found online via YouTube.

Will Simpson, currently a student at The Cooper Union in New York City, presents Auras and Auroras, a series of drawings that reach for narrative and myth at its most compressed and insular, presenting semi-legible situations and only the smallest illusionistic or spatial gestures. Elements of the drawings were referenced from found internet photographs of live-action role-players, bringing these deadpan images back into the realm of fluidity and fantasy.

Originally from Southern California, Petra Cortright often attempts to reconcile the visual language of computers (software interfaces, ASCII code, animated gifs, and instant messaging idioms) with the rhetoric of the "natural image." In "YARNSTRIPE" (2004) Cortright plays with the scale of digital imagery by working from a painter's perspective to produce an image under the size limitations of the digital software.

Justin Clark, a Louisville-based artist, creates small drawings, photographs and zines. For Build a Fire Clark will create a site-specific installation exposing the various media that influences his style.

Michael Guidetti, an interdisciplinary artist based out of San Francisco, comfortable with new as well as traditional media, builds up compositions by combining drawing and painting with projected animation. Additionally, his web-based project yyyyyyy.info is a constantly evolving composition made up of found text, images and various web elements, recalling the techniques found in a lot of his drawings and paintings.

Thomas Galloway, a New York City-based artist, influenced by found internet artifacts such as GIF animations, videos and collages, creates whimsical illustrations which echo amateur visual production of the internet. In "Tower Of  Tha Gods" Galloway creates grandiose monuments that celebrate banality of the visual vocabulary found on the 'net'.

Damon Zucconi, an interdisciplinary artist based out of New York City, whose work covers video, painting, web-based work, photography and sculpture. Zucconi plays with the manipulation of information, often by re-staging events using techniques of compression and expansion. In "Slow Rave" found footage from a rave was slowed down dramatically to allow the software to fill in the blanks between "real" frames, creating "artificial" information.