FICTION IS FACT

FICTION IS FACT

September 14-17, 2011

526 West 26th Street - New York

Jonathan Feldschuh, Elizabeth Riley, Mark G. Taber 

We use facts to tell a story, yet all the facts together neither make a story nor do they make a story more true—only more concrete in the telling. In art as in literature, one can use as one’s medium not only pigment or wood or stone or digital media, but the concept that something is either a well fashioned fabrication or a document of evidence. Ideas (and the preconceptions that accompany them) are part and parcel of any artistic creation’ public reception. The directed employment of a certain impressions, based in ideological truth, help form the basis for one’s esthetic pleasure. For each of the artists in this salon, the same can be said to be true, though they come to it via different routes.

Jonathan Feldschuh

Somewhere in Europe there is a high-profile government installation housing a piece of extremely specific scientific equipment, the Large Hadron Collider. It is being used to discern the elemental properties of cosmic matter, to answer all the big questions that have ordinarily been left to philosophers: where do we come from, and where are we going? Materially, that is. In terms of the very fabric of reality the LHC is being used to understand how the basic elements of energy and matter existed at the beginning of recorded time, what process is affecting them as time passes, and what will happen to affect the relationship between matter and energy in the distant future. An intimate knowledge of these contexts will allow mankind to make further discoveries which could advance us as a race, and to think beyond the causes and effects of historical discoveries important in their time (like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the discovery of atomic energy) which now are classic but approaching obsolescence. Feldschuh’s paintings achieve also a synthesis between pictorial impressions and painterly gestures. On one side of a large piece of mylar he paints the interior spaces, vast and grandiose though they are practical in their utility, with thrown paint on the other side; he affixes them to plastic boxes so as to allow for ambient light to illuminate both sides equally, combining their effects.

Elizabeth Riley

Also works abstractly, taking her cue from sensory experiences filmed on a digital camera and then fragmented, serialized, and sampled to then be displayed as film on a screen, as individual scenes printed wallpaper-style and hung or combined with objects. Riley is interested in taking short films of engaging sensory events, from as large as a waterfall, and as small as a piece of paper being waved back and forth in the hand. Her works create a bridge between a more familiar two-dimensional vehicle for images and the dematerialized moving image video, bridging the gap between mind and body. Riley uses moving image video and still frames to create a multidimensional experience. In her work we find a synthesis between the real of realism, and the real of the super-real--the material and the immaterial—and this is where we begin to explore the roots of both narrative and truth. The story Riley tells us is about an essential experience and how, in serialized fashion, it expands to become a sensory narrative with things to say about beauty, inspiration, reason, the senses, and the innate truths expressed by each.   

Mark G Taber

The most naturalistic artists here in terms of his subject matter, Taber is engaged not only with the origins of his theme, but also with their cultural and personal contexts. He describes the type of esthetic event in his work as “embodied vision” and there does exist, in each image, a bodily experience that is alienated from its site of origin by being first expressed as a scene in a popular film, TV show, or novel, transposed via digital media to the format Taber prefers: cartoonish figures re-enacting dramatic scenes that are otherwise overwhelmed by the sheer accrual of likewise imagery in our popular culture, printed on plastic and displayed on light boxes, and matched with texts that bring a degree of the artist’s own interior monologue to their effect.