Gallery Façade. September 2016.
e·0. 2016, 63.5 x 50 cm, aluminium, paint, iPads.
FA[av]. 2016, 129 x 93 cm, aluminium, paint, screen and video reproduction system.
+Tran. 2016, 136 x 94 cm, aluminium, paint, screen and video reproduction system.
Exhibition view.
Fa{C#. 2016, 263 x 188 cm, C-print on dibond, wooden frames, two smart TVs, counterweights, video and sound reproduction system, and painting.
U%ni. 2016, 129 x 99 cm, aluminum, paint, screen and video reproduction system.
0l_lo. 2016, 91 x 74 cm, aluminum, painting, screen and video and sound reproduction system.
m/un. 2016, 95 x 63 cm, aluminum, painting, screen and video and sound reproduction system.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
S>el. 2016, 263 x 188 cm, C-print on dibond, wooden frames, two smart TVs, counterweights, video and sound reproduction system, and painting.
Information
The American artist delves further into the body of work initiated in template/variant/friend/stranger (2015). Through large format pieces, he explores the relationship between identity and technology through facial recognition techniques. The psychological dimension of human nature, which has long been an obsession of Oursler’s, is addressed here through his typical equation of imagery, sound and text. The result is a digest of narrative tools that have been constantly evolving in Tony Oursler’s work since his early pieces as an art student in California in the seventies.
The artist’s interest in the face as the locus of communication and identity through features, movements and expressions is central to this exhibition, the artist’s first solo show of new work in Madrid in over 5 years. The work unveils his fascination with dormant beauty behind certain technological mysteries. A human daydream that transcends monitors and speakers; machines that resemble humans. One of the artist’s intentions in A*gR_3 is to “invite the viewer to glimpse themselves from another perspective—that of the machines we have recently created.” The degree of fiction in his work is not at random; it has always been intentional, present since his early videos. The simple and perhaps ungraceful work of building theatrical props becomes the backbone of his works, bestowing a more marked degree of fiction. It leaves the imagery and sound sustained in a primitive, almost infantile place. It is not unusual for the artist to use doll houses where he can spread his ghosts around the rooms. Oursler, one of the first artists to choose video as his native tongue- raised on the boom of TV and the American mass media- creates images that suddenly belong to all of us, though we are unaware. It’s as if they emerged from a bad dream.
That common dream is cast into his works; on the one hand, around contemporary art under Pop Art tradition; on the other hand, it provides an opportunity to operate both analytically and practically in the face of conceptual art. Yet Oursler’s art cannot be approached without a sense of humour or criticism, shedding light onto the dark side of common desire. A technical investigation into human psyche through the tools created between all of us to amplify the communication between individuals, groups and beings. These works raise questions about the pursuit of biometric data in facial scans, iris patterns and fingerprints, adding to our electronic profiles, and amounting to a sinister accumulation of personal information in databases that capture and categorise humans—and thus, which categorize us.
The performance of mathematical algorithms struggling to stratify humans, according to the accumulated data, is represented in this exhibit in a chorus of familiar strangers. It’s a family of echoes, voices, eyes that watch and perhaps see, and unfinished expressions of a common beat, the same ones hidden in Oursler’s own fertile and paranormal archive. Through January 2017, MoMA is devoting an exhibition to Tony Oursler. Imponderable is a unique audio visual installation inspired by Oursler’s own archive of images related to spirit photography, pseudoscience, telekinesis, stage magic and other paranormal manifestations. It’s material that he has been devotedly compiling about the most enigmatic side of humans, approached too through psychoanalysis, alive within the souls of the works that comprise A*gR_3.
Daniel Fernández-Cañadas, 2016