Dorfman+'s newest program, Read Into It, features eight artists, one work by each, that consists of painting, sculpture, photography, neon and digitally generated imagery. They each employ symbols and text in various ways to negotiate a path through the babble of white noise that confronts us daily. What is underscored in this negotiation - and the works presented in Read Into It - is the humor that is often overlooked in our age of "Information."
Michael Bevilacqua's paintings feature a globalized cacophony of imagery studded with logo-like texts and phrases that recall the Cubist origins of text in art. His work melds a sophisticated study of modern painting with an enthusiastic embrace of contemporary pop culture.
Graham Gillmore builds his art around a scaffold of teetering texts and phrases. The works focus on the indeterminacy of language, and represent a searching exploration of the enigma of human subjectivity.
Alejandro Diaz's work examines the state of communication in the public sphere via a series of laconic riffs on urban signage. His sculpture, neon works, and cardboard signs reflect his ongoing involvement with art as a form of entertainment, activism, public intervention, and free enterprise.
Blair Thurman creates installations, neon works, and paintings on shaped canvases and wood. Though often abstract in appearance, his work represents an elliptical and free-associative road map to an American landscape of cars, guns, n' beer.
Isabelle Le Minh works mostly in photography, often appropriating and reconfiguring the works and ideas of an earlier generation of artists in a series of erudite twists on the classification systems and archival impulses of the gallery and museum world.
Dennis Oppenheim was a pioneer of Earth and Body Art in the 1960's, often using his own body as a site of communication. The artist carried these concerns forward up to his death in 2011, in complex works that often employed machine-like constructions to explore bodily metaphors for the artistic process.
Erika Rothenberg uses familiar forms of public and private communication such as signs and greeting cards in darkly humorous works that reflect on the links between societal malaise and the breakdown of public discourse.
Siebren Versteeg is a multimedia artist who writes his own software code as part of complex dynamic video and sculptural installations. His work often intervenes directly in online media and commercial databases to create sophisticated critiques of capitalism's ever growing sprawl.
In keeping with the narrative spirit of the artists' work, Read Into It will create its own dialogue as works are swapped for new ones in a series of developing conversations throughout April, May and June. Please visit our website for updates and further information on each artist.
Alejandro Diaz
Happiness is Expensive, 2011
63 x 3 x 7.5 inches, white neon on clear Plexiglas. Edition of 5
Isabelle Le Minh
A Copy of The liar, the copy of the liar: after Francis Alys and WikiHow, 2011
43.25 x 65 inches, inkjet pigment print on Hahnemuhle paper. Edition of 3
Dennis Oppenheim
Upper Cut, 2000-2001
Mixed-media sculpture with hand-silkscreened books.
16 x 16 x 16 inches. Edition of 7