"Active Ingredients" / Broadway Gallery, NY
Jason Bryant
In the exhibition "Active Ingredients: Film, Stone, Plastic, Pigment," four artists whose mediums are radically different are brought together to explore how their depiction of reality synthesizes a common thread within their work, creating a very interesting dialogue with the pieces represented in this show.
Upon viewing this exhibition you see the works of Jason Head (Film), Steve Pauley (Stone), Marcus Morales (Plastic), and Jason Bryant (Pigment), all whose works seem to be coming from different places and times, but upon further investigation one can begin to see the subtleties of the connections between the works and what this exhibition hopes to convey.
With the film stills titled Independence, Jason Head created a series of films in which he constructs as video collage using such references as Rodman Wanamaker Expedition of Citizenship to the North American Indian and Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. By the juxtaposition of such films, Jason has created a series of works that raises questions on life and our vulnerability. Jason values the video and stills derived from the film as separate yet equal representation.
Steve Pauley gives us such works as Fast Floor and Thank you have a nice day, which are two stone pieces that place the viewer between want and waste. Fast Floor consists of 36 individual granite tiles, some of which have litter sandblasted into them as if memorializing its ephemeral presence in our everyday lives. This piece "engraves" into our minds the wasteful nature of our society. Fast Floor works well with Jason Head’s film stills in showing us the importance of what we have and how our wants and what we truly need are taken for granted.
Marcus Morales offers us a humorous but serious take on things with such works as Speedy Gonzales Pez Dispenser. This seven-foot replica of Speedy Gonzales as a Pez dispenser can be seen as a monument of a cartoon icon, and at the same time this sculpture conveys history, humor and the importance of different cultures and how they influence each other.
The fourth artist and exhibition curator, Jason Bryant’s paintings bring the final ingredient that mixes whether it is just visually or conceptually with the other images of this exhibition. With the painting A Brand New Kind of Innocence, Jason Bryant continues to explore the complex link between painting and film through a large-scale cropped image of a teenage girl who is wearing a tee-shirt with these disturbing abstracted skulls drawn on the front of the shirt. This painting along with Bryant’s other work Last call for drinks are cropped in a very cinematic nature and correlate with the hyper-realistic way in which all of the works in this exhibition are rendered.
All of the works in the "Active Ingredients" exhibition are connected on several levels, whether it is through the influence of film, hyper-realism, or how our morals and ideals have become increasingly jaded. Once all of the ingredients are mixed, this exhibition hopes to ask the viewer to explore how our notions of reality, even though altered through the veil of pop culture, media and politics can be represented in very different ways, and there often tend to be an un-noticed link between them.
