Please join us at the Jonathan Shorr Gallery at the opening reception for AndrŽa

Stanislav's exhibition "Flashland" on Thursday, May 22, 6-9 pm.

 

AndrŽa Stanislav's work for Flashland -- 3 channel video projection, sculpture, photography, glitter collage -- is sumptuous and transformative -- referencing a spectacular explosion that the artist staged in the Great Salt Flats landscape of the Bonneville Speedway -- a fireball rising hundreds of feet above the salt desert.

 

In the exhibited work, 2D glitter collages explode "anti-heraldic" crests created from distortions of archival materials trapped beneath gleaming resin surfaces. The collages become trippy shards of shrapnel metaphorically filling the gallery. Stanislav's seductive and scary animal sculptures echo the transformed creatures in the heraldic crests.

 

Flashland is a toe tag on the corpse of Utopia -- a work where text and lyrics recapitulate the obvious to arrive at inane profundities. A suggestion is made that Luddites, Levelers, and other culture workers have attacked hierarchy and failed to replace it with human dignity.

 

There is a considerable tension in the work between fictions and realities of representation. Technique, materials and verisimilitude are used obsessively and then tossed away casually to reduce and nullify formalism. Consequently, the mirrored obelisk explosion event is relegated to the status of a video relic.

 

Because the work collapses upon itself -- looping back like a mšbuis strip -- its obsessions are without rancor. Owning the dualities of being all-too-present and insubstantial at the same time, Flashland presents a psychedelic irony, a staging area where utopian impulses regroup for a self-replicating attack on the neural roots of hierarchy.

 

Jonathan Shorr Gallery

109 Crosby Street

NYC, NY 10012

t. 212-334-1199

www.jonathanshorrgallery.com

Gallery hours Tues-Sat 11-6