Free

10/20/2010 — 01/23/2011, The New Museum, NYC

Works by Liz Deschenes, Aleksandra Domanovic, Lizzie Fitch, Martijn Hendriks, Joel Holmberg, David Horvitz, Lars Laumann, Andrea Longacre-White, Kristin Lucas, Jill Magid, Takeshi Murata, Hanne Mugaas, Rashaad Newsome, Lisa Oppenheim, Trevor Paglen, Seth Price, Ryan Trecartin and David Karp, Jon Rafman, Clunie Reid, Amanda Ross-Ho, Alexandre Singh and Harm van den Dorpel. Curated by Lauren Cornell.

For the series "Redux", van den Dorpel appropriated movie posters from popular Hollywood films, including Cloverfield, The Lost World, and King Kong, which rely on costly technologies to create spectacular digital effects. These are the same technologies that are later used (by non-industry professionals) to capture and distribute the films for free via peer-to-peer networks and on CDs and DVDs. The collages in "Redux" are inspired by this radical shift in form. They draw on the commercial branding of the DVD-R & CD-Rs to examine the way content is carried in a post-cinematic, sometimes illegal state, where packaging and presence has been completely stripped down. By removing all figurative elements from the original posters and adding other material such as plastics, acrylic, glass, and spray paint, the collages lose their primary narrative and commercial context. What remains is a vastly different object, abstracted from its original, relying almost entirely on pattern and texture to convey a complex media transition, that is totally unlike, but haunted by its original content.

(Text by Jacob Gaboury and Lauren Cornell)

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