Shipper In Jail
Sunday December 16, 2012
12:00 - 5:00 PM
(or by appointment)
Martyn Stephen/Steven
522 West Garfield Ave.
Glendale, CA
91204
(323) 449 5679
1. Text for show at Spare Room Gallery, Shipper In Jail, March 2011
So, shippers always write these amazing, very detailed condition reports for my work, like, "frame is piercing other frame / plexi is cracked in 5 places / work is broken" etc. All of the gestures that I'm laboriously faking they very meticulously catalog, which I know that they must do to protect their ends, lest it should appear that they picked up 4 photographs from the gallery which somehow made it into this sculptural collision on the ride over to whomever they are delivering the work to. Joel and I have begun to take them at face value, wondering, who are these fucked up shippers breaking these perfectly fine framed photographs? We always joke that we have shipper problems.
This show at Spare Room is an exhibition of purple monochromes that I made by silkscreening solid purple over the inkjet prints before they were framed and over the fronts of the frames themselves. How my work functions typically, or engages within histories of painting or sculpture, or considerations of how this body of work functions differently within those histories aside, we were joking about what kind of crazy fucked up shipper would pick up these four photographs and on the way to delivering them not only get them jammed them into this sculpture, but would some how get the whole thing purple? That shipper would be fired — no, no, man, that shipper is going to jail!
2. Regarding new black monochromes, December 2012
Part of making the purple ones was to recycle the test prints and "bad" prints and "mis-stained" frames that occurred as byproduct from my regular working (these were the elements I printed over with solid purple), but more so I was curious to find out how these kind of image dependent sculptures would function if all the imagery was exhausted out of them, or literally blocked in, buried under, painted over. I chose purple the first time because it is my favorite color, and tried to match the purple to the color of smoothie I had been making every morning before going to work. ( …literally a choice based on taste... sorry... ). All told, I liked how the purple monochromes functioned and I wanted to make another set of monochromes, but another color this time. Black seemed a logical choice given how much I have been making work around/involving/dependent on the mirroring effects generated by framing dark — or better yet, solid black — images behind regular, glossy, UV plexiglass, turning the image into a mirror. Black'ed out ones could bring up a whole other set of questions. Is blacking out more something than purpling out? Less? Are these "murdered out"? (Technically, yes). Does the content in fact glare back at you with it's eyes closed like an angry cartoon child in the very bright sun? Arms crossed, "hmmph"ing out?
When I made the purple ones almost two years ago, I titled them sequentially, "Shipper in Jail 1," "Shipper In Jail 2," etc. There were 5 of them and I didn't think I would necessarily ever make more of them.So, as a means of delineating these from those past Shipper in Jails, I am titling these and potential future Shipper In Jail pieces without using numbers — numbers can get so crass in the double digits — and without a title reflecting color specificity (Without agreeing always, I do honor and share arguments for the impossibility of extricating "black" from "Blackness," which I did not intend to address with these), and to further engage the possible Painter-ly potential of these, I chose to begin titling them as a painter would, or more likely, how I would imagine that maybe a painter might, which is to say based on feeling. So here we have Shipper In Jail - 2002 Green Volkswagen Passat Wagon, Shipper In Jail - Festool RO 90 DX Rotex, Shipper In Jail - Stockroom and Syren, Shipper In Jail - Laura Pavement Karaoke, Shipper In Jail - Take A Picture BasedGod, Shipper In Jail - Oversteps, (all 2012).
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