Lower Gallery: 27 November 2009 - 17 January 2010 JACOB DAHL JURGENSEN Betwixt and Between
Upper Gallery: 27 November 2009 - 17 January 2010 JIMMY DE SANA
Jacob Dahl Jurgensen Betwixt and Between 27 November 2009 - 17 January 2010 Lower Gallery
Wilkinson Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Jacob Dahl J�rgensen. For J�rgensen's second exhibition at Wilkinson, the artist has created a theatrical installation, which consists of individual works including video, screen-printing and sculpture. The show plays with exhibition conventions, language and narrative, and employs mathematical concepts and metaphors to examine subject/object relations in the face of changing technological paradigms. Staged as if halted in the process of being installed or de-installed, the artworks casually lean, hang and sit on the floor of the gallery space. The gallery lighting is off and instead the space is lit by a handful of freestanding lamps with coloured light bulbs.
Figure of Eight, Reconfigured is an architectural structure designed specifically for the gallery space. Consisting of large black frames, some open and some covered with fabric, the structure plays with transparency and accessibility. As Its title suggests the design reflects the shape of a figure of eight (the symbolic representation of infinity). However, the construction is not fully assembled, ambiguously and paradoxically frozen in the process of either being put up or taken down.
Light Play Red Green Blue, is a projected video work. The title is a detournement of Laszlo Moholy Nagy's well-known film Light Play Black White Grey from 1930. In J�rgensen's video the kinetic sculpture has been replaced by a laptop computer as the object under examination. In a digitally animated sequence the 'camera' zooms in on the computer's screen, (which is showing a film about a potato crisp factory), to the point that the image becomes only red, green and blue pixels (hence the title of the work). The video continually moves back and forth in between these two fields of reality and simulation.
Topos, Topics, Tipp-Ex, is a video work in which two actors, a man and a woman, read out from a found script. The set is obviously a mock-up of a 'white cube' gallery space. At some point in the script confusion arises as to whose lines are whose, and the two subjects become unmoored. Sticking with the script, the two actors's characters are swapped. Everything is repeated, line for line and shot for shot, but with the roles reversed to create a narrative Moebius strip.
Semiosis? Is a series of colourful screen-prints of antique vessels. The images, which come from the artist's research archive, and have all been found on the Internet, display heavy compression artefacts. Printed on transparent Perspex, their shadows are visible through the images themselves. But this transparency blurs the images and obscures their interpretation, as their shadows create the effect of a double exposure. As the title of the works suggests the images hover in between picture and sign. But the objects in the images, the containers, are here paradoxically reduced to pure surface, form without content.
J�rgensen lives and works in London. This year he has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Rudiger Schottle, Munich, and Nicolas Krup, Basel. Upcoming exhibitions include Croy Nielson, Berlin, and Overgaden - Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen.
Jimmy De Sana 27 November 2009 - 17 January 2010 Upper Gallery
Wilkinson Gallery is pleased to announce its second exhibition by Jimmy De Sana (1950 - 1990). In 2008, Wilkinson exhibited his seminal photographic work 101 Nudes, which consisted of 56 half-tone reproductions of De Sana's (seemingly) casually shot black-and-white photographs, originally created in 1972 when the artist was in his early twenties. The upcoming exhibition will include a selection of colour works from later in De Sana's career, not shown since his final exhibition in New York with Pat Hearn Gallery in 1988.
De Sana's work was influenced by Surrealism. He created unexpected juxtapositions between object ands bodies, limbs and torsos, often in a tinted glow of artificially coloured light. He printed all his own work and used his friends as models and was a member of a generation of artist-photographers known for making rather than simply taking pictures, taking Man Ray's idea of creating the photographic image from scratch.
The two publications on De Sana's work include, Submission, 1980, a project with William Burroughs who he met and photographed in New York. As one of his final projects, he made a limited edition publication with A.R.T. Press which included an interview with Laurie Simmons, who now runs his estate, and an essay by Roberta Smith.
Jimmy De Sana is currently included in the exhibition, Looking at Music: Side 2, curated by Barbara London at MOMA New York. Solo exhibitions include, White Columns, New York (2007), Galerie jablonka, Cologne (1989) and Pat Hearn Gallery, New York (1988, 1986). Group Shows include Erotophobia, Simon Watson Gallery, New York (1989), Staging The Self: photography 1840 -1985), National Portrait Gallery, London (1986), New York, New Wave, PS1, New York (1981) and Times Square Show, New York (1980).
