Re / Post
curated by Ian Cofre

Philip Hackworth Ashley / Pedro Barbeito / Adolfo Bimer / Lydia Dona
Franklin Evans / Alejandro Leonhardt / Fabian Marcaccio / Martha Mysko
Willie Wayne Smith / Rafael Vega

Re/Post is a group exhibition posited as a response to the notion that there is an ‘always there’ there to the practice of painting. Each of the ten participating artists challenges the act of seeing through the subversive use of materiality to deny the fixity of the still image. Through the dissolution and reconstituting of concepts, personal preoccupations, readymade imagery, and digital and physical artifacts, these artists externalize the complexity of expanding awareness beyond the self in the Digital Age to evolve a personal language that vacillates between abstraction and representation.

These works do not attempt to operate in a 1:1 ratio between image and object, a WYSIWYG1 strategy of the prevailing, reductivist aesthetic that is intrinsically fungible, indulgent of the desire for speed, and which lulls the viewer into a safe space of the already-seen. Instead, the works in this exhibition introduce varying degrees of friction and chaos into this yawning cavern of perception, what participating artist Fabian Marcaccio has termed the “treacherous gaze.”2

Given the prevalence of interpreting and digesting images through the exclusive site of the mediating layer of the monitor and ever-shrinking screens – a territory for vision that is negotiated through the thumbnail and circulated through, most commonly, the compressed industry standard of the JPEG3 – the included works go against the general regression in pictorial approaches in ways that defiantly expand and collapse the phenomenological gap between image and object.

Ian Cofre is an independent curator and writer based in New York City, working primarily with emerging and established artists, locally based and from Latin America. He earned his BA at Columbia University, and has previously worked as Director for a Lower East Side gallery, Studio Manager for a high-profile contemporary artist, and most recently as US Director for the PINTA NY art fair. Recent projects include barriococo at The Royal Society of American Art (Brooklyn, 2014); co-curating as one of ten curators, TEN at Cindy Rucker Gallery (New York, 2014); Bigger Than Shadows, DODGEgallery (New York, 2012) with Rich Blint; and both Tracing the Unseen Border, La MaMa La Galleria (New York, 2011) and Southern Exposure at Dumbo Arts Center (Brooklyn, 2009) with Omar Lopez-Chahoud. Other shows include Behind Closed Doors (2011), a curated solo project by Manuela Viera-Gallo at Y Gallery, NY, and The Doubtful Guest (2010) at Kill Devil Hill, NY. Recent writings include co-authoring an essay for the Hyde Park Art Center and a bilingual profile of Alberto Borea for Arte al Día. Profiles and reviews of exhibitions he has curated have appeared in The Art Newspaper, Arte al Día International, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

[1] What You See Is What You Get. [Read more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG]

2 Lit: El ojo traicionero.

3 The term “JPEG” is an acronym for the Joint Photographic Experts Group, the name of the committee that created the JPEG standard and also other still picture coding standards. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG]