WE LIKE WHAT YOU EATWEDNESDAY 16TH APR - SATURDAY 17TH MAY 2008

PRIVATE VIEW - Thursday 17th Apr 

WE LIKE WHAT YOU EAT is a micro survey exhibition investigating a specific set of tendencies in the practice of a selected group of North American contemporary video artists.The appropriation of pre-existing mainstream entertainment media is the dominant refrain in the work of the artists featured in this exhibition. The internet, in particular video streaming websites such as YouTube, as well as television programs, advertisements, music videos and cinema serve Paul B. Davis, the duo Javier Morales + John Michael Boling and Eric Fensler with an abundant territory from which they draw both their inspiration and subject matter.

In terms of exposure, the art gallery has been matched and perhaps even surpassed in importance by the website itself as an artistic platform for the included artists. In exact accordance with this relocation, there is no singular or predictable audience for their work and that of its ilk; from high school computer geeks to international curators - the fascinated take no dogmatic form.Immediate, humorous, inventive and, above all, relevant - the artists in WE LIKE WHAT YOU EAT stand as the selected representatives of a much larger movement which, while having an international span, nonetheless maintains its spiritual centre in the United States of America……….

Paul B. Davis [BEIGE] is a DJ, educator and data artist as well as being a founder member, alongside Cory Archangel, of the programming ensemble BEIGE. He had his first solo show at SEVENTEEN in 2007 and will present a solo booth at the SEVENTEEN stand at the NEXT Art Fair in Chicago, April 2008. He presents one of his trademark YouTube hacks - glitchy, pixilated visual mash-up's constructed via the manipulation of the compositional data contained within a number of standard video clips taken from the websiteJavier Morales + John Michael Boling first collaborated together as fellow students at the University of Georgia. Their collective oeuvre is here represented by two key video collaborations, The Church of The Future (2006) and Body Magic (2006); both television re-edit works that are mystical, musical and indeterminately potent.

Together Morales and Boling run the website 53 o's (http://www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/channel53/) and program the video blog Channel 53. Eric Fensler's diverse creative output is beyond singular classification - comprising television re-edits, cartoon re-cuts/re-voicings, Polaroid photography, music videos and network television screen writing. For the exhibition he presents a number of video works including the much lauded GI JOE PSA series - manipulated versions of the public service announcements that accompanied the end of each episode of the cult toy franchise's popular children's television cartoon. A series of evening screenings of related video material from each of the artists will accompany this exhibition. Please contact the gallery for more information regarding these events and the exhibition in general ……….WE LIKE WHAT YOU EAT is the inaugural exhibition at SEVENTEEN's new basement exhibition space - curated by Paul Pieroni.

In late May SEVENTEEN will follow this exhibition with the first major survey of the British Scratch Video phenomenon (1983/6). SCRATCH! will run from the 28/05/08 to the 25/06/08. 

It was the best of Time Outs, it was the worst of Time Outs

Shay Kun Outburst, 2006 acrylic and oil paint on canvas 36 x 48 in

PV Thursday Feb 1st 6pm

This series of landscape paintings by Shay Kun draws heavily on a very specific historic period and location, namely the Hudson River School of the 19th century. Kun’s landscapes particularly reference Thomas Cole’s (1801-1848) reverent paeans to nature and Albert Bierstadt’s (1830-1902) towering Yosemite cliff faces, awestruck visions of the sublime in the American West. Both artists focused on idealized pastoral landscapes, whose romanticism is evident in the synthetic composition, and held values that were rapidly dismissed and out of fashion even in their own lifetime.

Kun’s works, however, denote their cultural position with the addition of interlopers in the scenery. Applied in acrylic as opposed to the oil background, the inserts are not only out of place and out of scale, but they are moreover out of context, geographically and/or socially.

Pristine vistas are blighted by tightropes, flagpoles, killer-whales and evidence of contemporary human presence; battleships, estate cars and frogmen. The contrast between these contemporary figures and their stylized and specifically dated environment is abrupt, but despite this, they’re an almost offensively inadequate substitute for the deities or characters of noble bearing that filled their place in painting of the past centuries. The cut and paste figures seem oddly pathetic, and while their jarring absurdity echoes the Knights and maidens in Thomas Cole’s Gothic fantasies The Departure, 1837 and The Return, 1837, their modernity somehow fails to match their romanticized predecessors’ august and worthy outlook.

The works, however, remain open-ended as Kun’s almost contradictory decision to paint the landscapes himself rather than appropriate or collage onto existing images, implies a degree of sincerity and even a celebration of the Hudson Valley School.

If this much love, labour and effort is employed in the production of these landscapes, perhaps the re-presentation of these aesthetics might be justified beyond any ironic nod to the fickle cycles of art history.

Shay Kun lives and works in New York.