Since the dawn of consumer culture, the fine art of sculpture has inevitably had to negotiate its relationship to the explosion of stuff into everyday life. In the past thirty years, the nature of this association has been concretized in many ways, ranging from elevation to critique and multiple points in between. The periodization of the important post-war German sculptor Isa Genzken’s practice, since the 1970s until today, not only addresses this shifting relation, it… [read more »]
Tabor Robak Saga
Candy Crush enthusiast and app-appropriationist Tabor Robak is presenting his latest work in a solo show that just opened at Team Gallery. As a programming virtuoso, Robak disrupts virtual ideologies and aestheticizes game imagery through playful cyber subversions. The gallery-goer will find herself riding a looping roller coaster one moment; browsing through sleek refrigerator goods in another; and settling down for a cozy picnic in stunning simulated landscapes. The widget-witted Robak offers us a comprehensive insight into the ongoing gamification of reality.
Working in programs including Unity, After Effects, Photoshop and Cinema 4D, he explores a secondary, digital reality, rendered in what he refers to as a “Photoshop tutorial aesthetic” or a “desktop screensaver aesthetic.” His meticulously produced and filmed environments are cobbled together from sources both sampled and hand-modeled. The works are appropriative, both in their subject matter and aesthetic, using elements purchased and then edited for his purposes. Adopting the visual vocabulary of contemporary video games, Robak isolates and comments on digital space as an abstract fact, while simultaneously pushing up against the increasingly tenuous separation between perceptions of the digital and the real.
Update your iCals! The exhibition, Next-Gen Open Beta, will take place from November 24th to January 12th at Team Gallery, located at 83 Grand Street (between Wooster and Greene).
