Sayre Gomez, Windows And Mirrors: Kavi Gupta | 835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago, IL, 60607

19 November 2011 - 29 January 2012
Overview

Kavi Gupta is proud to present Windows and Mirrors, the debut exhibition in his Chicago gallery of new work from the Los Angeles based artist Sayre Gomez. On view are the artist’s new works on canvas, thirty small works on paper, and a single graphite drawing. By mining images and texts from various blogs and image archives, Gomez’ new works are an extension of the artist’s inquiry into how aesthetics inform perception and how meaning is disseminated and contextualized.

 

Selecting images on a solely formal criterion, Gomez states that he seeks “Images that imbue a sense of familiarity yet remain difficult to place, this begins to create a dialogue about an images’ legibility and thus the frameworks through which we use to digest them. Through the incessant re-constitution and re-experiencing of any number of said images, a lapse in their contextual foregrounding becomes apparent. They begin to resonate with viewers in variety of ways, and can begin to function more as abstractions… While the previous generation’s engagement with image culture was primarily through television and print media, the images being absorbed were contextually bound to their original sources implicating the process of appropriation as something definitively politicized. While these implications may still be present the appropriative process here is intended to be less political and more populous..”

 

Naturally, Windows and Mirrors is also the artist’s nod to the classic dichotomy of the divergent metaphorical narratives in the history of painting. Painting here is seen simultaneously as a window through which a pictorial space is created – a virtual theatre – and conversely, through its use of an appropriative discourse, can be thought of as a reflective autonomous object unto itself. In Gomez’ own terms, “in the works included the images and phrases fluctuate between subject and substrate.”
A site specific installation of the same title will run concurrently at New Capitol, an alternative space located in the warehouse district of Chicago’s West side.

 

Sayre Gomez holds a BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago (2005) and an MFA from CalArts (2008). Recent exhibitions include ZZYZX, at Las Cienegas Projects in Los Angeles, Self Expression or Fog and Other Works at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Berlin, Germany. Recent group exhibitions include Sayre Gomez, Sean Townley and Bobbi Woods at Luis De Jesus in Los Angeles, Other People’s Projects at White Columns in New York, and The Awful Parenthesis curated by Aram Moshayedi at Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles. Gomez is also included in the new book published by Lawrence King, titled 100 New Artists, he was born in Chicago in 1982 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Installation Views