Starkwhite at ShContemporary
10 - 13 September 2008
Starkwhite will present four artists - Gavin Hipkins, Hye Rim
Lee, Jae Hoon Lee and Grant Stevens - at ShContmporary08, from 10
to 13 September 2008, plus preview days (8th & 9th). This
year's fair coincides with the Shanghai Biennale
Gavin Hipkins
Auckland-based artist Gavin Hipkins employs a diverse range of
photographic styles in his practice ranging from pictorialism and
romantic landscape representation, through a high-end advertising
aesthetic, to the experimental approaches of the 1920s avant-garde,
along with some of his own innovations, such as strips of uncut
prints pinned to walls in rows. More recently he introduced digital
montaging into his practice, seen in the photographs from his
Empire and Second Empire series, presented at the
Starkwhite booth. This work employs line illustrations from
children's Empire and Commonwealth annuals used to illustrate
stories of adventure and historical drama in accord with the
formation and ideological sustainability of the British Empire and
Commonwealth. The backdrops have been overlaid with scanned patches
purchased in music stores and markets creating photographs that sit
somewhere between history paintings and t-shirt art.
Hye Rim Lee
Korean born artist Hye Rim Lee says she is interested in "art that
expands our understanding of interactivity, digital aesthetics and
the culturally loaded significance of software reflecting the
Animamix cultures of Japan and Korea." Her work challenges the
conventions of the traditionally male-dominated worlds of game
structure and 3D animation, specifically when it comes to
virtualised images of women. Candyland is a suite of
digital stills presented in circular, candy-colored frames,
featuring the artist's highly stylised, curvaceous warrior-vixen
TOKI who draws on the Japanese tradition of manga, Korean animamix
and Western ideals of sexuality and beauty. Six images from this
series are presented at Starkwhite's booth.
Jae Hoon Lee
Korean born artist Jae Hoon Lee is known for his video and
photographic works that engage the natural sublime and the
technological sublime; that conflate high-tech artifice and bodily
organicism; and that fuse vernacular experience with a sense of the
religious or spiritual. The work continues to hint at new forms of
visual experience, as Lee combines a photographic logic with the
isometric perspective-free gaze of the scanner and the 'planiverse'
collaging tools of the computer. Lee is represented in the
Starkwhite group show with two digitally manipulated photographs
and an earlier video, A Leaf, where a series of leafy
spines each run seamlessly into the next, and at dizzying speed,
creating a green geyser of morphing species, to a soundtrack of
cicadas.
Grant Stevens
LA-based Australian artist Grant Stevens presents a new video
text-mandala, In the Beyond, at the Starkwhite booth.
"Stevens is known for his pithy text-videos exploring vernacular
and mass media truisms and recalling advertising, movie trailers
and relaxation videos. Stevens trades in clichés, platitudes
and stock phrases but points to their richness probing the overlap
between mass media fictions and everyday reality. While some of his
works play with language's slipperiness, others emphasise its
hyper-lucidity. Against the backdrop of modern life's impossibly
hyperactive schedules, his new works go fishing for personal
reflection, self-expression self-help, new age spirituality and
other ways to get a grip." Robert Leonard, IMA website, Brisbane,
Australia
Located in New Zealand on Auckland's Karangahape Road,
Starkwhite presents a programme of artists' projects, solo shows,
independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new
music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite also
represents artists from New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific
rim.
Starkwhite
510 Karangahape Road
Auckland
New Zealand
Tel: 64 9 3070703
starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz
www.starkwhite.co.nz
