Ken Solomon, 24/7/360, 2010, installation view, Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York

Ken Solomon, 24/7/360, 2010, installation view, Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York

Ken Solomon, 24/7/360, 2010, installation view, Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York

I Didn't Do It, 2010, oil on canvas, 34 x 26 inches

Powering Off.. Circle.. Line, 2010, oil on canvas, 15 x 10 inches

Ken Solomon, 24/7/360, 2010, installation view, Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York

Ken Solomon

24/7/360

April 8 – May 15, 2010

 

The gallery is pleased to present 24/7/360, Ken Solomon’s third one-person show. The exhibition includes new paintings and drawings as well as a single-channel video. Ken Solomon’s work promotes pauses. His new paintings are slow searches, painstakingly reconstructed snap shots in an attempt to arrest the constant flow of information on the web. He freezes screens to capture an enemy that drifts away, conspires and multiplies at the speed of light. Link after link, brush stroke after brush stroke, and with a good dose of humor the artist sends warning signals of a potential Google Tsunami.

Google Links is a 24 foot long, 8 panel watercolor of overlapping search windows. It starts with the word begin and ends with links with numerous surprises along the way. Each image reads as a vignette, a visual subplot resulting from a particular word or phrase. The Beatles White Album, Picasso's Woman in White, a cluster of white pills tell a story for the word white. Each search finds a commonality with the subsequent one. "White" overlaps with the image search for "1979" (Alex Katz's White Hat 1979), which commences a new journey. The vignettes cross paths, in the spirit of Robert Altman's seminal movie The Player.

A group of Google Portraits  are visual preservations of a fleeting moment. Fossils of digital information, they translate the results from image searches into watercolor. Three Face Book homepages of various people who share the name Kenneth Solomon explore notions of cyber and digital identity. I Didn’t Do It is a self-portrait, censored behind a pixilated grid obliterating the face. Powering Off …Quarter Moon...Six O’Clock is a sequence of five small paintings of a screen shutting down with its center wheel shifting grey scale around the clock.

24/7/360 is a video in 24 variations. For the past 8 years Ken Solomon has photographed virtually every circular object/form that he has encountered in his daily life. Over 5,000 photographs of seemingly totally random and separate images are linked by a circle that appears to the right, slightly off center. The circles are scaled to match perfectly, the moon is shrunk, a quarter is expanded.


Born in Washington DC, Ken Solomon lives and works in Brooklyn. His work has been included in various exhibitions the United States. His video Micro & Soft on Macintosh Apple (a collaboration with Marco Maggi) was on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Several of his drawings are also included in MoMA’s permanent collection. His work is now on view through May 27, in Size Does Matter, Curated by Shaquille O’Neal at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York. Recent exhibitions include: NeoIntegrity: Comics Edition, at The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, New York (2010); WALL ROCKETS: Contemporary Artists and Ed Ruscha, Curated by Lisa Dennison, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (traveled to the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY) (2009/2008); Lightcone, Nettie Horn Gallery, London (2009); American Ream, Warehouse Gallery at Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY (2009); 
Slow Scandal, Point of Contact Gallery, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY (2009).