ARTIFICE

About

“Art is never pure imitation… even the most accurate representation is only a means to an end.”

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1845)

Sitting Room Gallery is pleased to introduce ARTIFICE, a group exhibition of works featuring Thomas Blair, Lena Christakis, Luca Leung, Asher Liftin, Lukas Milanak, Danny Sobor, and Giancarlo Venturini. The presented works collectively suggest an altered experience of reality to reveal the multifaceted nature of human perception. ARTIFICE opens with a reception on Friday, September 20th and runs through October 11th.

From the Dutch Golden Age to the Spanish Baroque, the binary of realism and illusion has motivated art historical discourse. Artists have continually reckoned with notions of representation, navigating tensions between the observable world and artistic imagination. The paintings, drawings, and sculpture selected for ARTIFICE inspire similar discourse, engaging in tactical visual techniques to mold subjective notions of existence. The works exhibited are not simple representations but rather opportunities to transcend imitation, inviting us to question what is real and what is artifice in today’s societal landscape. 

In Gold(e), Thomas Blair transforms a scanned Wolfgang Tillmans photograph into a material hybrid, generated by a cycle of subtractive airbrushing and restorative inkjet printing. Blair’s gleaming depiction of heaped gold bars evades categorization, challenging the legibility and materiality of artistic creation, in addition to blurring authorship and boundaries between media. Lena Christakis’ painting Mirror Self-Recognition Test, depicts a proud magpie peering at its reflection, which stares back with a similar expression of fulfillment. Playfully referencing the like-named 1970 animal awareness experiment, Christakis’ illusionistic interpretation conflates the canvas’ internal and external worlds, minimizing the distinction between reality and representation, self and other. Devoid of temporal markers and identifiers, Danny Sobor’s Powder Room and Doorway are disquietly subtle paintings of close-up and cropped scenes sourced from the search engine Yandex. Obscuring the division between virtual and physical, Sobor’s paintings represent the generation of digital detritus that is as subjective as the meanings transposed onto them. 

Where Sobor’s work draws from the ambiguity of digital spaces, Asher Liftin similarly engages with the disorienting tension between organic forms and technological structures. Liftin’s drawing Orchids I, created for this exhibition, depicts the magnified form of an orchid twisting against the confines of an imposed algorithmic grid; calling to mind the pixelation of digitized images, Liftin skillfully distorts the viewer’s field of vision such that object and ground energetically blur and overlap. In Mahakala, Luca Leung contributes a biomorphic interpretation of cultural and personal signifiers rendered through the myopic intensity of drawing. Leung nimbly illustrates the direct yet abstract trajectory of her thoughts, proffering meaning through a combined appreciation for her disparate identifying markers as she reflects on her mother and the Buddhist deity of Mahakala. Presented as a theoretical relic from a bygone era, Lukas Milanak’s sculpture Lawnmaster combines simple, raw materials with powered technologies to simulate a nostalgic experience with nature. A cluster of hand-cut green tissue paper is activated by wind generated by a costume fan positioned below, while a group of perfumed sticks mounted on the right provides the encompassing artificial scent of grass. Desktop Quasar similarly explores the realm of simulated experience, replicating the pulsating energy of a quasar star achieved by the interplay of polarizing light filters and glass. Giancarlo Venturini’s painting Scope (Radoweic) depicts a blurred green landscape with a central red dot recalling the disorienting effects of optical illusions. Referencing the romanticism of Old Master landscape painting while leveraging our collective visual memory, Venturini’s Scope artificially replicates the dizzying sensation of contemporary love.  

Today, the perennial debate surrounding the role of artifice in culture is more pertinent than ever. The media-saturated visual landscape of our time increasingly blurs the boundaries between the real and the artificial through a proliferation of digitally manipulated images, deep fakes, and virtual realities. The selected artworks in ARTIFICE negotiate the limits of perception through engaging in acts of digital and material manipulation, ultimately shaping how we interpret the world around us.