Exhibition

so far, so good

23 Apr 2022 – 21 May 2022

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
Closed
Wednesday
15:00 – 18:00
Thursday
15:00 – 18:00
Friday
15:00 – 18:00
Saturday
Closed
Sunday
Closed

Special hours

29-Apr-2022
15:00 – 18:00
30-Apr-2022
14:00 – 18:00
01-May-2022
14:00 – 18:00

Free admission

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OFFICE IMPART

Berlin
Berlin, Germany

Event map

A solo exhibition with artist Aaron Scheer

About

It is 2018, it’s dark outside and the printer is jammed inside. Aaron Scheer is running the thing at full speed. Once too often, the machine goes on strike. No one can know in advance how many layers of ink it can smoothly maneuver through. One round after another, it finally stops. The paper crumples, the ink runs out. Scheer tickles the machine beyond its capacity limit. Use it, exploit it, misuse it. In search of the perfect mistake, the artist wrestles with the machine.

Modern technology is dedicated to functionality. Gadgets and apps work perfectly when they precisely and reliably pay attention to the scalability of human productivity. Nothing blurs, nothing hangs, nothing glitches – within seconds, everything is loaded. That’s how it should be, but that’s not how Scheer wants it. He provokes states of technological exhaustion in search of the humanity of the machine.

It’s 2019 and Aaron Scheer is lying on the couch. He fiddles with his tablet, swiping through the app switcher. He takes a screenshot, makes hundreds, calls them „painting materials.“ He pushes them apart, lays them on top of each other, and collages them, straining his own finger mobility to the maximum until only small scraps of photographic substance point to the work’s origin.

Scheer’s works look like what the Internet feels like – at least to mere mortals who are content with front-end navigation. Scheer rips familiar elements of the common screen experience out of their context, alienates them to fake the familiar.

It’s 2016 and Aaron Scheer is in the midst of an identity crisis. He has painted with oil pastels, he has worked purely digitally. Painter or media artist? Post- according to the jargon, but that sounds so backwards. Post-everything-ness? Post-[insert anything here]? The attempt to define a new aesthetic is answer enough for Scheer. He prefers irritation to complete dissolution.

One is inclined to misunderstand Scheer’s work. His compositions tempt one to look for traces of image processing software or AI. Yet almost all of them are based on a white JPG. Like a white canvas: at the beginning a line, a block of color, drawn by hand, a classic image composition. Scheer works without a design. He runs his material through various programs – Photoshop, Mac Preview, Figma, Illustrator. Layer by layer. The status quo is exported as a JPG, no edit file cached. Each command S – a state to which he must respond.

It’s 2020 and Aaron Scheer wants to know. To know what the Internet thinks about 

him. So he asks Google. He uploads a work via reverse image search, and the algorithm shows him similar images. Scheer struggles with abstraction. Before anyone interprets a cloud into his work, he lets the machine lay it out: _Color technology art Images – Search. Titel done!  .

Scheer works in series. Printer Paintings, Analog vs. Digital, Tablet Paintings, DaNA, Reverse Image, Digital Noise, GIFing, Unboxing. The latter are still very fresh. Digital Watercolors hypnotic as a good screensaver – or a spicy subreddit. Actually, you have to move on, but you look again. That’s how all his pieces work, actually.

Text: Anna Meinecke 

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Aaron Scheer

Aaron Scheer

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