August 27, 2010 – September 18, 2010
Opening: August 26, 2010 from 19.30 to 22.30

A change of phase…means a change of equilibrium.
— Henry Adams, “The Rule of Phase Applied to History”(1909)

Gentili Apri presents Translation as a Structuring Principle: If A Then B, a group exhibition with works by Patrick Armstrong, Lindsay Lawson, Marlie Mul, Hayley Silverman, Anne de Vries and Damon Zucconi, organized and curated by If A Then B on the occasion of the launch of the namesake journal, issue 1.

Aphasia stands at the locus of our perceptions. The moment we strive to make visible this empty center is the moment most fraught with its negative violence; this is the translator’s duty, to frame a language at the precipice of failure.

The work of art is often its own best translator. A work translates an original; or, the original masquerades as its copy. We have no way of distinguishing the two.

If A Then B works with writers and artists, at the limit of this structure, who use translation as a tool for production. On the occasion of the launch of our journal issue 1, If A Then B presents an exhibition of works which play off these themes in further variations.

The parallel logics of substitution, virtuality, and replacement have dispelled the singularity of the unique art object. Commentary overshadows production; works derive their own self-critique.

This structure is apparent in the works we have chosen which, generated in an economy of iteration, are continuously self-alienating. Misinterpretations, errors, failures of understanding—these are more fruitful for any ‘final’ result than the adherence to fidelity, either to a mimetic love, or to the possibility of a representational sphere outside that of the duplicate.

We have felt the need to shift forms of production based on the inherent, generative duplicity of the works we translate; the journal is only one moment in the continuous orbit of these rotating mediums. The exhibition provides its extension, a translation of a translation.
Or it might go the other way.

Invalidenstr. 50/51, 10557 Berlin, behind the “Hamburger Bahnhof”/ http://ressort-berlin.de/
June 10 to 29, 2010 / Opening: June 9, 6-9 p.m.

Enchanted features works that lure the viewer in with a teasing game, arousing irresistible fascination like the snare of a trap. They subvert the order of the reality they are a part of by mimicking, exceeding or inverting the appearance of the so-called real world. The artworks trap us within their restricted structures by imposing their own rules and their own logic. Through this trickery they lead the audience out of the universal system of meaning and value. This sudden break in reality creates the effect of enchantment.

We live today the promotion of good material nature — truer than true ; the process each artwork uses is the artifice of seduction — falser than false. They somehow gain an irony towards the true nature and reveal that “real” in-depth space is always potentially reversible.

We do not believe that the truth remains true once the veil has been lifted —Nietzsche in Nietzsche Contra Wagner

Aids-3d (Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas)
Lorenzo Bernet and Till Forrer
Juliette Bonneviot
Peter Coffin
Harm van den Dorpel
Matias Faldbakken
Lara Favaretto
Yngve Holen
Alicja Kwade
Stephen Lichty (performance)
Darri Lorenzen
Rodney McMillian
Marlie Mul
Aude Pariset
Jon Rafman
Timur Si-Qin
Hayley Silverman
Maxwell Simmer
Damon Zucconi

curated by Juliette Bonneviot

March 26th–April 15th 2010

With work by Matthew Brett, Andrew Laumann, Jason Lazarus, Peter Sutherland, Ann Woo, Damon Zucconi

@ Reference

Duncan Malashock, Sabine Gruffat, Damon Zucconi, Elna Frederick, Ilia Ovechkin, Kelli Miller

curated by Brian Droitcour

Opening reception – Friday – December 11, 2009 – 7-9pm
Closing Performance by BFFA3AE – January 17, 2010 – 6pm

Narratives, performances, personalities, and politics are fine for screenings, but who likes catching a sequence of events at a random point and watching from middle to middle, while standing up? The best videos to show in a gallery are impersonal (i.e. abstract), on short loops, and rooted in the equipment on which they are shown, to minimize the difference between following the movement of images over time and contemplating an object in space. Most of the works in “Moving Shapes and Colors” meet most of these criteria; if they all met all of them it would be dull.

A discussion of abstraction in contemporary video needs a vocabulary beyond Plato and Aristotle, Malevich and Tatlin, invisibility and objectivity. This work involves code and electron guns, things that trouble stale dichotomies of abstract and concrete, and are troubled in turn by fallacies about the immateriality of digital information. It sounds dry and wonky to talk about an animation as a manifestation of data. But the outcome, with bold lines and CMYK palettes, triggers associations with pyramids, pentacles, and glow sticks. It’s the legacy of nu rave, rest its soul. The selection of works in “Moving Shapes and Colors” is designed to aggravate these issues, not resolve them.

Duncan Malashock, Temple: The artist draws and plots an electronic signal in Max/MSP to produce a dynamic stack of fluted lines. Their movement throbs with a cutting drone, the audio component of the same signal.

Sabine Gruffat, Video Synth #1:Gruffat also works with digital pulses, but unlike Malashock she forgoes external references. The image on screen is offered directly as an electronic signal, and her colored monitors focus attention to the hardware. By putting a synthesizer in the gallery, Gruffat allows viewers to take part in the manipulation of the image’s parameters.

Damon Zucconi, From Black to Blue: A few lines of code increase a color’s opacity to the maximum, reduce it to nothing, and repeat the process in a loop. At each end of the function the totally black and totally blue screens look like two kinds of a monitor’s blankness, on and off, but the movement between them realizes the entire range from zero to one.

Elna Frederick, Asymptote: An evocation rather than a textbook illustration of the mathematic function named in the title, Frederick’s .png file sends a field of yellowish pixels bouncing against a pink counterpart, reaching variable heights in unresolved, perpetual motion.

Ilia Ovechkin, FX 1: Slideshow software and Photoshop’s gradient tool are two devices for creating illusions of depth on a two-dimensional screen. Ovechkin’s study in flatness and space combines those two tools, so that each one exposes and augments the other. The monitor is laid horizontally, and the eggs arranged across its top are a foil to the simulated volumes on the screen’s other side.

Kelli Miller, The True Believer: The only work here with words and people. Miller’s subject is the cottage industry of magic crystals, whose consumers have faith in shape and color as agents for the delivery of abstractions–happiness, health, prosperity–into real life.

Brian Droitcour is a staff writer for Rhizome at the New Museum and a contributor to Artforum.

Posters by Tim Lokiec, Maxwell Pitegoff, Travess Smalley and Stewart Uoo.

179 Canal Street has been functioning as a venue for emerging art and curatorial projects since May 2009 with the intention of continuing indefinitely or at least till May 2010. For more information, please contact Margaret Lee at 179canal@gmail.com.

Opening Hours: Friday/Saturday/Sunday 12-6pm and by appointment.

Curated by Harm van den Dorpel. Works by: Samuel Beckett, Charles Broskoski, Harm van den Dorpel, Ida Ekblad, Thomas Galloway, Jodi, Tobias Madison, Ilia Ovechkin, Christopher Pappas, Hayley A. Silverman, Ola Vasiljeva, Damon Zucconi

ClubInternet.org

Curated by Domenico Quaranta. With Alterazioni Video; Gazira Babeli; Shane Hope; Miltos Manetas; Gerhard Mantz; Eva and Franco Mattes; UBERMORGEN.COM; Damon Zucconi.

Karlin Hall, Thamova 8 – Praga 8
May 14 – July 26, 2009
http://www.praguebiennale.org/

AIDS-3D , Maurizio Bianchi, Brody Condon, Shane Hope, Xavi Hurtado, Michael Jones McKean, Dexter Sinister, Damon Zucconi - 05 September – 11 November, 2008

Project Gentili

Curated by Laurel Ptak for Young Curators, New Ideas at Bond Street Gallery