In conjunction with his upcoming show at Los Angeles' Honor Fraser Gallery, works by artist Jeremy Blake will be on display in The Lobby of The Standard, Hollywood as part of the 24/7 Projection series. The show at the Honor Fraser Gallery, Liquid Crystal Palace: Recent Works with Jeremy Blake, is an opportunity to view Liquid Villa (2000) by Jeremy Blake alongside more recent works by Jeffrey Baij, Petra Cortright, Chris Coy, Sara Ludy, Rafaël Rozendaal, and Travess Smalley. By bringing these works together, the exhibition will draw out shared concerns that have been obscured by the passage of time and Blake's tragic death. Blake was an early pioneer of digital art, lauded for his mercurial "moving paintings," shape-shifting mixes of abstract painting and digital film. The installation at the hotel will feature three of his now iconic films: Sodium Fox, Winchester Redux, and Berkshire Fangs.
Sodium Fox, 2005: Sodium Fox is inspired by a poem by Nashville based poet David Berman who also narrates the work. According to Blake, "The voice that emerged in Berman's raw material struck me as a sort of Generation X everyman and so the imagery follows suit and forms what I have come to think of as a time based 21st century American landscape painting."
Winchester Redux, 2004: Winchester Redux is a special abridged version of Blake's Winchester trilogy. The Winchester films combine 8mm film footage, static 16mm shots of old photographs, hundreds of ink drawings, and intricate frame-by-frame digital retouching. They provide an abstract and emotional tour--not so much of the architecture of the Winchester House in San Jose, California, but of some of the more fearful chambers of the mind of the home’s owner and architect, Sarah Winchester.
Berkshire Fangs, 2001: Berkshire Fangs (an evocation of Keith "Slick" Rhoades's second project, a home for "stylish vampires" erected on the site of a historic structure he rashly demolishes) suggests ominous glamour with its dusky palette and pop-sinister formal tropes—a lunar oculus that glows behind shuddering foliage, a twist of bold flowing color that sprouts fang-like appendages—revealing the dark side of the will to power.
Jeremy Blake's works: Sodium Fox, Winchester Redux, and Berkshire Fangs, for The Standard, Hollywood's 24/7 Projection series will be up through early April. His exhibit at the Honor Fraser Gallery, Liquid Crystal Palace: Recent Works with Jeremy Blake, will be on display March 1 through April 5, 2014.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Jeremy Blake (1971-2007) was born in Fort Still, Oklahoma and received his BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (1993) and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California (1995). Blake trained as a painter, and he was able to translate his understanding of medium and material to his digital works at a time when the artistic implications of new technologies such as Photoshop and the flatscreen display were still poorly understood. Blake’s animations can be seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love and the music video he produced for Beck’s “Round the Bend.” His work is currently included in SFMOMA's Project Los Altos and In the Séance Room: Acquisition Highlights from 2003-2013 at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Blake was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1999) and his work has been exhibited widely domestically and internationally.
Music video, Beck's "Round the Bend", produced by Jeremy Blake.
All images courtesy of Kinz Fine Art and Honor Fraser Gallery.
