Composite Factor

Justin Berry
Arielle Falk
Jesse Hulcher
Alyssa Taylor Wendt

June 3 - July 10, 2011

Opening Reception: Friday, June 3, 6-10pm

INTERSTATE PROJECTS is pleased to present Composite Factor, a group show featuring four Brooklyn based artists utilizing varying methods and approaches to the act of erasure and replacement.

By digitally removing the signifiers of plot and character from book covers, Justin Berry creates abstractions that become portals into possible worlds. These works are portraits of places that don’t exist, of science fiction worlds and of implied narratives. Books make claims of meaning, whether they are fictional stories or databases of fact, they attempt to inscribe order onto the world. In these works that order has been upended, and all that is left is the structure of that claim, an armature on which a world could be built and on which a set of values could eventually arise.

Arielle Falk presents Lego Your Ego, an installation consisting of a new video and selected sculptural and photographic pieces from her SUNGLASSES FOR THE FACE series. In her burlesque of a boutique, Falk showcases her handmade SUNGLASSES FOR THE FACE, which are designed to obscure the features of one’s face, and therefore serve to defend against a double gaze; the nonspecific, generalized gaze of the other and the self-conscious, inwardly directed gaze informed by the ideal-ego (one’s image of their perfect self). The centerpiece of the pyramidal-shaped installation is a video, a parody of a daytime infomercial, which humorously demonstrates how these sunglasses are intended to “work.”

Pushing standard consumer software to its logical yet absurd extremes is the focus of Jesse Hulcher’s two works represented in this show. His video Road Trip is a new trailer for the film Jurassic Park using iMovie 11?s Jurassic Park styled film trailer template, and War and Peace – New Abridged Version 2011 utilizes Microsoft Word’s autosummarize feature to par down one of the most iconic, and longest novels of western literature into a convenient 29 pages.

Alyssa Taylor Wendt’s PALIMPSESTS analog print series uses multiple negatives, both found and her own, of recreated, reenacted or re-appropriated situations. Burned and dodged by hand, the unique single editions address historical sediment and possess a certain spiritualism that transcends the limitations of the photographic medium.

Artists' Websites

Justin Berry
Arielle Falk
Jesse Hulcher
Alyssa Taylor Wendt