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
Gallery hours Tues-Sat 11-6