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This might seem like a relatively basic question but if I were to say that the experience of looking at Richard Prince’s rephotographed Marlboro ads made me weep, then what would be the difference when encountering the original as a magazine spread — would there be some kind of meaning inherent in that experience if the ad brought me to tears as well as the Prince? Surely people don’t cry when looking at these works, but there is something to be said about the nature of how we experience our world considering the ubiquity of appropriation, not just in visual culture but in music, advertising and films — all aspects of aesthetic production. What now are the mechanisms employed by art that let you know that it is art? And how are we qualifying these experiences? |
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Sayre Gomez, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, NYC.
Sayre Gomez Debuts at The Hole
By Amanda Schmitt
LA conceptual artist Sayre Gomez will debut his innovative and challenging works at the Hole this November in a major exhibition that will include painting, sculpture, drawing and installation. Through his iteration of imagery and subtle shifts in material and presentation, Gomez explores a very digital sensibility in relationship to image making in the 21st century, while updating tradtitions of oil painting and bronze sculpture. Recent shows at Las Cienegas Projects and a solo with Kavi Gupta in Chicago this year have shown Gomez to be a great new and critical voice in the young art scene.
“Culture’s supposed highest form of visual production: what does it mean when this sensation is found more commonly within culture’s lowest forms of visual production? Does the biological act of being brought to tears by a combination of external stimuli lose its value? Do the deceivingly calculated psychological exploits perfected by the advertising and Hollywood film industries explain this sensation? Does this prompt us to re-evaluate how we understand our experiences? How do we as viewers locate meaning in our experiences with aesthetic production be it artwork or advertisement, and how is it that we can tell them apart?
Sayre Gomez, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, NYC.
This might seem like a relatively basic question but if I were to say that the experience of looking at Richard Prince’s rephotographed Marlboro ads made me weep, then what would be the difference when encountering the original as a magazine spread — would there be some kind of meaning inherent in that experience if the ad brought me to tears as well as the Prince? Surely people don’t cry when looking at these works, but there is something to be said about the nature of how we experience our world considering the ubiquity of appropriation, not just in visual culture but in music, advertising and films — all aspects of aesthetic production. What now are the mechanisms employed by art that let you know that it is art? And how are we qualifying these experiences?
My work sits at the locus of the formal and the conceptual and playfully investigates how these two approaches to art making inform one another. The strategies I employ are used to look at what it is that qualifies something as one designation of cultural production vs. another; how we understand these experiences and glean meaning from them.” – Sayre Gomez
