Kim Light/LightBox presents You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth, the first solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based collaborative artists Simmons & Burke. Simmons & Burke’s works shimmer with highly faceted collage compositions of appropriated images, celebrating contamination by digital replication, popular culture, and the history of art.
The visual and audio components are marked by an intricate collage aesthetic, assembled solely from content carefully collected from internet sources. The artists’ user experience of browsing for digital source material heavily forms and informs these works; they relate this process to the chance operations of John Cage.
Case Simmons & Andrew Burke take cues from early traditions of collage; notably the Surrealist collages of Max Ernst and the political photomontages of John Heartfield. As individual components, each appropriated photograph has been painstakingly cut, scaled, and digitally overlaid until the accumulation across the picture plane suggests a unifying perspectival space. Their compositional strategies find affiliations with Renaissance and Baroque formulas for directing the viewer’s eye to and from areas of narrative emphasis—Da Vinci’s aerial perspective and Caravaggio’s radiant central focal point play an important role organizing these dense collages.
WHERE:Â Light Box 2656 S. La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90034
WHEN: September 6 - November 1, 2008
Reception, Saturday, September 6, 6 - 8 pm
More Info: kimlightgallery.com
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