Tony Oursler, Painting + Paper: Ooze
These images are from Painting + Paper: Ooze, Tony Oursler's most recent exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery http://www.lehmannmaupin.com, New York, running 17 Feb - 24 March 2007.
Oursler’s work explicitly addresses an uncanny presence evoked in psychological and perceptual responses to media structures.
TONY OURSLER, Red "Love Hurts" Laboratory, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
58 x 47 x 4.5 inches
147.3 x 119.4 x 11.4 cm
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK
Articulated in a collision of sculpture, painting, video, and performance, at Lehmann Maupin seven such works are exhibited in a single room. Formed in aluminium, and set slightly off the gallery wall, a flat, coloured surface is opened to reveal body parts - an eye or eyes, a face, lips, fingers - morphed to reflect the abstract shape in which they are captured. Over time, in some of the works, the body parts change.
Issues of Presence are explicit - these works take up each other's time. Fixed to the wall, they assert a belonging to the animated realm of the visitor: some of them look and wait.
TONY OURSLER, Purple Ideation Exposure, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
59 x 47 x 4.5 inches
149.9 x 119.4 x 11.4 cm
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK
Linked to this, these pieces evade the forms they explicitly invoke. They assert painting, relocating video art into conventions of surface, paint, the hand, and abstraction. At the same time, this abstraction is loaded: these works play with play, denial, objectness, investment, fiction, science fiction, gothic, colour theory, animation.
TONY OURSLER, Invisible Green Link?, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
57 x 61 x 4.5 inches
144.8 x 154.9 x 11.4 cm
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK
From March 2007, we will be developing an online analysis of Tony Oursler's work, including discussion of recent exhibitions, past work and key publications.
As part of this, we will be publishing a series of interviews on presence with Tony Oursler. The first of these were recorded by Nick Kaye in New York in October and November 2006.
This ongoing engagement with Tony Oursler's work is developing at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/327, including a fully illustrated analysis of this current exhibition.
Tony Oursler's extensive website, including image and video documentation, is at http://www.tonyoursler.com/.