Curated by Lauren Schell Dickens and Julie McKim.
Featured Artists in the exhibition include: Guy Ambrosino, Helen Dennis, David A. Faust, Christina Gundersen, Jessica Mein, Molly Springfield, and Cody Trepte.
Amidst recent preoccupations with new media, post-studio practice, unmonumentality, performative practice and media super-saturation, it might seem that the place of the artist’s hand has been eviscerated, digitized into invisibility. With laborious and time-consuming manual processes performed over and over, the artists of At Arms Length obsessively attempt to bring experience back within arm’s reach. These seven artists directly and indirectly address the loss precipitated by technological advancement. Labour, meticulousness, and repetitive manual processes replace the “Command-P” mentality of much contemporary art, while a deliberate, thoughtful fusing of media replaces the laise-faire “no media” approach that often renders the artist’s touch obsolete.
Guy Ambrosino’s , watercolors, based on the snapshots by American soldiers of Abu Ghraib prisoners, omit the photographs’ central figures, leaving a setting only identifiable by caption. By methodically hand-tracing and painting these pervasive images, Ambrosino’s process is a personal meditation on the possibility of familiarizing a distant event.
Molly Springfield laboriously hand-copies Xeroxed pages of theoretical texts, ink smears and all. Her meticulous drawings belabor the futility of manual reproduction, addressing the relationship between text and image, while grappling with issues of reproduction and originality, technology and labor, digital and analog, pencil and print.
Cody Trepte manually executes binary code-the universal language of computers-to explore the differences between human and technological expression. His video This is how I cope with my neuroses is a literal translation of its title into binary code, which Trepte then communicates through blinking.
The uncanny snapshot aesthetic of David A. Faust’s photorealistic oil paintings evoke a subtle disquiet embedded in the American psychic landscape. By alluding to photography through themes of light, reflection and transparency, Faust reveals alienation as endemic to the banal scenes of everyday.
Christina Gundersen’s series Fallen, based on both found images and original photographs, is an investigation of control articulated in the moment a horse stumbles and falls. By obsessively painting the suspended moment of mid-fall, Gundersen re-inserts the painterly hand into an otherwise photographic moment, pushing the documentary abilities of painting.
Helen Dennis combines drawing and photographic processes to create architectural images she calls “photographic drawings”. By layering several drawings on top of photographic paper and exposing them to light, Dennis unites a variety of hand-rendered perspectives with a photographic process. The resulting hybrid medium temporally references both the instantaneity of photography and the duration of drawing.
Jessica Mein’s work explores the tension between the mediated space of film, and the physicality of drawing. In a cyclical process that emphasizes the entwining of these two mediums, the expanded frame of video is both a means for “sketching” her drawings and a surface for their execution.
At Arms Length is a NURTUREart Emerging Curators’ Program Collaboration. Learn more about all NURTUREart’s programs and opportunities for emerging artists and curators at
Reception: Friday, Jan. 11th, 7 – 9 p.m.
