Mary Jones, Sleeves, 2015, oil, silver leaf, spray enamel and X-ray on panel, 20″ x 16″

Future Past Perfect

Nov. 7th – Dec. 13th, 2015 

Featuring works by Michael Ambron, Mary Jones, Rachel Klinghoffer,    

John O’Connor, & Bayne Peterson

Curated by Lauren Comito

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 7th, from 6-9pm

Projekt722 722 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn (Graham L train stop)

The Future Past Perfect indicates that an action will have been completed at some point in the future and simultaneously acknowledges that the action has already taken place. Future actions and forms are recontexualized versions of the past.

These artists are tied together by their interest in exploring the historical progression of totemic forms and seek out the invention of new forms for the future. In Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle” handmade clay pots become the most valuable relics of a paranoid, fractured culture; a way people could hold on to a trace of their remembered humanity. The artists in Future Past Perfect are similarly invested in the evocation of the earliest signifiers of our human imagination. It is through these hand-created images and objects that we haptically connect, and communicate an empathetic moment through space and time.

As our own technologically driven age becomes one of increasing environmental pressure and cultural fragmentation, volumes of cultural works describing the end of our species have been created, suggesting an apocalypse that is played out with endless variety and circumstances. Clearly, this is something we can imagine. The insistence on materiality and the presence of physical form in these artists’ work suggests a post-apocalyptic present. The metaphor of the artifact that these artists use can range from digital fabrication to ancient cave painting, haiku to personal artifacts; all reflect an unsentimental awareness of our circumstances, and consider the basic elements of what might and could be essential.

Michael Ambron endures varied states of consciousness through his practice of painting; moving away from language and recognition/identification towards the outer margins of sensory perception. He uses the activity of painting to create a distance from the normative modes of engaging with reality, thereby offering the opportunity to experience rich and unusual altered states within his works.

Mary Jones‘ paintings find fragments of human form at the edge of recognition within an abstract process. Eschewing overt figuration, she makes reference to ancient, imaginary sculpture through a layered and intuitive approach. This fragmentation organizes the paintings as a gestalt, intended to evoke a connection with the earliest signifiers of our human imagination.

Rachel Klinghoffer explores an unconventional painting practice that engages with a laborious process of making and collecting. She incorporates personal items that range from lingerie to Hanukkah decorations. These articles evoke her personal connection to femininity, Judaism, romance, and other notions of painting – her works have become specimens, icons, and relics that are poked, prodded, stroked, rubbed, then pulled, torn, and broken apart.

John O’ Connor looks for patterns in the material present in everyday life. His most recent work involves ideas of political and social recurrence – the ways in which class structures are repeated across generations. O’Connor’s work investigates the ways in which information about human behavior is quantified and displayed, as a way to give specific form to the seemingly unexplainable actions people undergo.

Bayne Peterson‘s work is research-based and process-driven, drawing on a variety of narrative, historical moments, aesthetics and ephemera. He explores iterative series that take the form of multiple artifacts presented for study as either scale-shifted representations of the banal or updated modernist gestures. Using 3-D modeling tools within his process, Peterson investigates the limitations and failure of technology to articulate sculptural form.

Lauren Comito is an artist, curator and educator who lives and works in Brooklyn. She dedicates this exhibition to her late professor Frank Bramblett.

*Text written by Ross Klavan and Lauren Comito

Lauren Comito: New Editions
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 5th, 2015

Michael Steinberg and Eminence Grise Editions proudly announce the publication of new works by Lauren Comito. Comito’s work incorporates the use of technology and everyday ephemera that is habitually utilized by a mass audience. Specifically her work looks closely at the way images are created, retrieved, circulated and stored.

This body of work is inspired by the correlation between the world of advertising and memory, in particular Edward Bernays’ development of public relations. Employing Sigmund Freud’s writings on psychoanalysis, Bernays paved the way for the world of marketing and advertising through his use of focus groups, which investigated people’s emotional connections to products. Comito mines her own archive of personal digital photography of places she has lived, pairing different packaging containers that came from goods or consumables she associated with that place. Her work alternates between traditional art marking techniques and digital processes. These incorporate barcodes and QR codes that transport the viewer back into the digital realm.

In providing further explanation, Lauren Comito states: “I decided to embed visual QR codes into the prints to incorporate a digital extension to be initiated by the viewer.  Any willing participant can scan these codes to create a further exchange of information, a sort of transaction. The viewer can reflect and project their own narratives onto both the video and physical work before them.”  

The QR codes used by Comito are linked to various types of media, including stop motion animations, image slideshows and video. The barcodes are also linked to the actual products purchased.  QR code and barcode function doubly in Comito’s work, as a gateway to layers of personal history, and as a formal visual pattern.  Comito notes that visual codes of this type have an indeterminate lifespan, which mirrors the ebb and flow of information content in social media.

Lauren Comito currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Recent exhibitions include a two-person exhibition at Projekt 722, Brooklyn and a solo exhibition at Slag Gallery, Brooklyn.

Eminence Grise Editions is the publishing division of Michael Steinberg Fine Art. This new venture will continue Michael Steinberg’s long-term commitment to innovative editions by contemporary artists.  Among the recent publications are works by Derrick Adams, Ok Hyun Ahn, Lauren Comito, Yevgeniy Fiks, and Sandrine Guerin.

Philadelphia Containers, 2015, pigment print with QR codes and barcodes on Hot Press, 20 x 24 in, Edition of 18

Marllarmé, A Throw of the Dice

Lauren Comito and Sarah Pater. Curated by Hilary Doyle
Opening Reception Saturday, August 1, 6-9pm

August 1st – 23rd, 2015

Projekt722 is pleased to present “Nothing / Will Have Taken Place / but the Place”, a show of work by Lauren Comito and Sarah Pater. The exhibition takes its title from Marllarmé’s poem A Throw of the Dice, in which the “nothing” moment before the die is cast is charged with meaning—empty spaces between words evoke silence and achieve abstraction.

The work of Lauren Comito and Sarah Pater investigates places of solitude. Both Comito and Pater explore day-to-day life, containment, and archiving in different ways.

In Comito’s Container Series, collected containers from food and everyday goods purchased over the course of one year lead to several related bodies of work. In one phase of the project, Comito made plaster casts of each container to make “solid blanks”, which give form to the negative space from within each vessel. In her Everyday Color Sample project, Comito combines photos of places she has lived (Providence, Philadelphia, Brooklyn) layered with flattened packaging containers that she associates with these places. Color is determined digitally using Photoshop to create color samples derived from her personal photo archive of these spaces. Using her own internal logic, Comito creates an inventive form of representation by combining everyday moments and ordinary objects to discover new psychological implications of the commonplace.

Pater documents the quotidian experience of everyday spaces using the language of reductive painting and repetition. She catalogues and extracts solitary moments from her office environments, such as a series of aloe plants near a window meant to “soothe” the worker. Two large paintings depict ominous shadows cast by plants on walls in evening light. The peaceful solitude initially suggested by the paintings is offset by a sense of stifling confinement. Artist Jackie Gendel writes: “Pater’s subtly humorous subject is the strange spatial absence found at the intersection of office space and office time; where the question of utility is fraught with the anxieties of ‘spending’ and ‘wasting’, as opposed to the reverie of ‘passing’ time and ‘traversing’ space.”

Projekt722 is an art gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that hosts exhibitions by contemporary artists and independent curators. Projekt722’s mission is to be a exhibition platform for great work, to contribute to the city’s diverse art community, and to promote dialogue around important contemporary artists.

Projekt722 is located at 722 Metropolitan Ave, Second Floor, Brooklyn, NY  11211

Check out the 2nd Issue 

Stilllife_010 (a classic, Coca Cola, talent show), 2014, 30 x 22 in, watercolor on paper

Compression (39 pages and counting), 2014, 16×20 in, digital print on archival matte paper

Baggage (detail), 2014, size variable, digital prints on fabric and thread, 10 piece installation

LAUREN COMITO: Artist Statement

“The Menagerie” presents a selection of works taken from my ongoing Search Engine Project that has persisted over the last three years.  Initially I was interested in how commonplace Google Image Search has become and how it is utilized in everyday life. The project began by conducting a series of image queries using the phrase “no comment”. I chose this phrase for its ambiguous meaning and for the potential variation within the query.

The search engine also became a place for aesthetic inquiry. The formal display of Google Image Search is gridded in such a way as to be reminiscent of Modernist painting and architecture. Relationships between images are coalesced through formal devices such as resizing and containment. The viewer is left to have a fluid and cohesive aesthetic experience, via unitization of disparate images, although the viewer’s sense of scale and resolution (quality) of these images is always indeterminate.

The two large paintings in the exhibition pay tribute to this formal display. Over the years Google has added further customization features to its image search. One of the more recent features is a time-based search. For seven days I tracked both the 24-hour image search query and the default search query. These two paintings used the first “page” of results as a formal mapping. Each image was reduced to a rectangular block of color that was dictated by the most dominant color found within the image.

The varied material investigations employed attempt to mimic common digital image manipulations, such as applying filters, superimposing and skewing. The resultant physical manifestations investigate how the display of the search engine, as well as the images themselves, operate when placed into the physical realm.

The Stilllife works on paper began by printing the query images at their actual size rather than their display size. These image prints were mounted to individually cut pieces of foam-core that correspond to their print size. The digital images thus become transformed into literal building blocks that can be physically rearranged. I assembled these image-objects into stacks, which then served as a still life to paint from.

The query images are at times printed onto different types of fabric and either stretched over an armature or allowed to embrace the sag of that particular fabric. The Search Engine Nightlights are paintings comprised of stretched digital prints on fabric and many layers of mark-making, which create a literal physical thickness. In order to see the previous underlying layers the paintings must be illuminated from the backend. Baggage is comprised of ten enclosed cotton voile pouches. The images were first digitally superimposed and printed onto transparent fabric. These pieces are deflated shells; the surface image now a transparent flaccid skin lacking a skeletal structure.

Baggage (installation detail), 2014, digital prints on fabric and thread

“The Menagerie” June 13-July 13, 2014

Opening Reception, Friday, June 13, 7-9 PM

Slag Gallery is pleased to present “The Menagerie” featuring new works by Lauren Comito.

Mining from mediums of mass culture like Google image search, Comito’s work explores the implications of several genres of art making. The work brilliantly succeeds in establishing a constant, resonant voice throughout the exhibition. Working with the limitations and possibilities of new media, Comito renders answers that are both creative and critical, her entire oeuvre conveying a unique sensibility.

All of the images that make up the work featured in this show were retrieved from the Google image search of the phrase no comment. This search was conducted several times over the last three years. The term was chosen for its blanketing ambiguity as well as for the concrete variations attained in the resulting search.

“In my studio I engage with multiple projects that may have divergent trajectories. Shifts in perception and the way in which we navigate through ‘space’ occur frequently. I cannot choose a fixed position but rather attempt to locate temporary placements. I produce work that is reactionary and in correspondence to a sensibility to control. I am interested in exploring notions of image construction, as seen in both painting and common digital processes. My work utilizes a combination of procedures that alternate between digital processes and physical/material manipulations. Reformatting and mechanisms of cropping, duplicating, scaling and saturating are simple devices that create a shift in perspective and urgency.”

Comito received her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, 2013 and her BFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Elkins Park, PA, 2007. This is her second solo show in New York. Her works are featured regularly in group shows in the US and are a part of numerous private and public collections around the globe.

For press inquiries and reproductions, contact Irina Protopopescu at 917.977.1848.

For general inquiries, contact the gallery at 212.967.9818, or visit www.slaggallery.com

Slag Gallery

56 Bogart Street, Ground Floor, Brooklyn NY 11206
LOCATED ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE MORGAN L TRAIN STATION

GALLERY HOURS:

THURSDAY – SUNDAY, 1 pm-6 pm

MONDAY – WEDNESDAY BY APPOINTMENT