Your
Show of Shows
By Bruce Helander
Huffington Post
"At
this moment in history, Gray has strategically put his foot through an
invisible, historic curtain (but not in his mouth) that like his
predecessors, armed with an explorer's compulsion, bravado and a burning
ambition, literally changes everything."
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Just when you thought it was safe to go back to
the sizzling streets of Chelsea, not expecting to discover something
particularly notable in the typical "summer show" venues but
nevertheless making the rounds, out pops a truly unique and memorable
exhibition that is shaking things up. "Birth of a Legend,"
recent works by Cameron
Gray, the Venice, California-based artist, recently opened at
Mike Weiss Gallery, is
commanding a great deal of attention and with good reason.
Gray has spent the better part of the last
decade assembling disparate pictorial fragments into a grid of painted
squares that have been meticulously crafted from miniature two inch
four-sided compositions on board. Each puzzle piece needed to fit precisely
in order to build a much bigger picture that eventually formed a curious
collage of a recognizable work, like a Warhol dollar sign or a Lichtenstein classic
portrait. These attractive and amusing visual exercises were a valuable
experience that taught the artist about the rewards of having patience and
the fine art of foraging literally around the world in order to compile
something pretty amazing. Everything he learned in the past, it seems, was
simply a dress rehearsal for this show at Mike Weiss, which coincided with
the gallery's tenth anniversary.
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In this exhibition, the
artist takes a deliberate quantum leap from his past strict geometrical
neo-cubist inspired arrangements to a stunning examination and idiosyncratic
salute to the collage aesthetic. The ingenuity shown here follows in the
tradition of great innovators who were initially controversial, yet
transformed into those who made history. Gray joins a special fraternity of
inventors that have harnessed the internet's limitless imagery inventory,
which became a de facto and integral extension of his studio and allows him
to acquire a complex inventory of often bizarre images, painstakingly woven
together and loaded with sexual innuendo, in hilariously nutty situations a
la "Mission Impossible," with strange people doing really odd
things and laced with a left-footed goofiness so over the top that it becomes
a serious contender for Ripley's Believe It or Not! His "found
objects"-also known as "internet trash"-from the World Wide Web
are cleverly mixed, altered, spliced, diced, electrified, homogenized and
usually animated to boot, and, like a seasoned carnival pitchman, he
continues throwing unexpected, hypnotic curve balls at the viewer that become
home runs. Following Picasso's historic lead, where the artist added a new
dimension to painting by attaching a single piece of newspaper to his canvas,
Gray, no stranger to the challenges of collage, has found a convincing
additional step forward to the ongoing history of this artistic discipline,
which has caught the art world off guard.
Early pioneers like Braque, Ernst, Arp, Duchamp and Schwitters
felt compelled to find another aspect of pictorial compositions that also adopted
the French word coller-to paste-and expanded the topography of a
work's flat surface until a painting became more sculptural. This morphed
into the technique called assemblage, from another French word: assembler-to
collect. The development of the camera introduced a new level of reality to
two-dimensional art. As photographs (and now video) became more widely
available, artists generated a new method called montage (an important aspect
of Gray's work), once again from the French monter-to mount.
Eventually and predictably, this process sprouted into photomontage, which
was invented by the German artist John Heartfield in the early twentieth
century and later followed with assemblage made popular by Joseph Cornell, the
real master of the technique. Art made from car parts (Chamberlain), wood
scraps (Nevelson), drugs (Tomaselli) and a shark (Hirst), all owe their
audacity for change to the pioneers who were exploring provocative new
territory outside of a traditional palette. It didn't take long for artists
like Robert Rauschenberg, Ray Johnson and Romare Bearden to completely engulf
their work in the collage aesthetic, which continues today through the
assemblage work of artists like Richard Prince, Llyn Foulkes and Tony
Berlant. The artist who somehow elegantly assimilated all of the above and
who is aligned most closely with Cameron Gray is the brilliant and
unsurpassed photomontage Dada-Surrealist, Hannah Höch, and her friend, Raoul
Hausmann. Step by step, layer by layer, artists continued to add new and
often shocking dimensions with fragments of novel materials, which ultimately
developed into a polished and acceptable format that welcomed innovation and
controversy. At this moment in history, Gray has strategically put his foot
through an invisible, historic curtain (but not in his mouth) that like his
predecessors, armed with an explorer's compulsion, bravado and a burning
ambition, literally changes everything.
Gray's gargantuan video collage installation is mesmerizing,
holding your gaze with its pulsating electronic vignettes and drawing you
closer for a surprising examination of uncommon voyeuristic phenomena. The
largest work in the show, I Have a Feeling I Shall Go
Mad...., an all-encompassing 12-foot wide installation comprised
of twenty-seven monitors, is a flashback to Times Square meets Japanese
animation on an alien ship painted in Day-Glo colors. Thousands of moving
electronic collage squares overlap each other and compete for your attention
like a rare, crazed and determined Tasmanian bird doing a ferocious mating
dance with pre-meditated intentions in mind. It's Been a Series of
Unforeseen and Unexpected Circumstances Outside of My Control, a
quite amazing construction, is an epic 7-foot-tall pin bricolage; 3,000
photographic images call out for your notice, selling their dubious wares and
strutting their eccentric stuff. In another part of the exhibition, four
pinned-to-the-wall, cordless "electronic" posters of heartthrob pop
stars are displayed at the entrance to the gallery, requiring the talents of
a young Sherlock Holmes and his knack for uncovering clues to solve the
mystery of how they were constructed.
 This is a perfectly
pleasurable show, with each wall presenting another inventive
"step" on a magical neon ladder that Gray, a former stand-up
comedian, is swiftly climbing with deadpan enthusiasm. One part of the
exhibition might be more suitable for the "Dining Out" section of The New York Times: Gray seems to enjoy playing with his food, in this case,
a smorgasbord of plastic fake fare often illuminated by black lights, which
he arranges to illuminate simple circular Arcimboldo-inspired smiley-face
assemblages that incorporate items insinuating eyes (sausage patties), a
frowning mouth (plastic hot dog), or two turkey dinners forming the eyes of
one piece and a glazed, faux Jell-O mold for its nose. In this optical feast
for the eyes with handmade, circular stage sets appropriate for a classic
movie like "Picnic," everybody gets enough to eat and no doubt will
come back for seconds. A scene in David Byrne's classic movie, "True
Stories," also comes to mind, in which the nutty dad offers his
astonished family a quick overview of commerce at work; looking down on the
dining table, asparagus becomes railroad tracks, plates emulate service
centers and the whole tabletop dinner becomes a hilarious, illustrated aerial
view of industry on parade.
Cameron Gray has taken a fortunate cue from the
developmental pilgrimage of modern masters to explore an amazing new
extension of collage and assemblage that converges in an unforgettable
presentation, giving credence to the show's title of "Birth of a
Legend" as a palatable, mythic description and--arguably the most
photographed exhibition currently in Manhattan--something to write home
about.
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Bruce Helander, Huffington Post, July 16, 2013
Bruce Helander is the
Editor-in-Chief of The Art Economist, the recently launched publication that
examines the contemporary art market. He has a master's degree in painting
from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he later became Provost and
Vice President for Academic Affairs. He is a former White House Fellow of the
National Endowment for the Arts and has been awarded several grants from the
New York Foundation for the Arts. As an artist, his work is in over fifty
museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney
Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A work of his was
included in the recent Sotheby's auction of the estate of actor Dennis
Hopper. He has been a contributor to numerous magazines, including Art and
Living, ARTnews and The New Yorker. His latest book, Learning to See-An
Artist's View On Contemporary Artists From Artschwager to Zakanitch, was an
Indie Awards Finalist.
Other Selected Press from the Show:
By Stephanie
White Walls NYC
"It was like the whole
internet and every meme and every gif threw up onto a 1997 geocities website
designed by a thirteen year old with ADHD. It was like the jittery headache
of a Ryan Trecartin video but I actually knew what was going on. It was like
Marco Brambilla but trashy. It was like what would happen if you went inside
tumblr. It was neon and movement and flashing and more neon and flashing and
gifs and gifs and gifs."
"The last room in the
gallery consisted of sculptures that seemed to be the video in static form.
The largest made out of little paper cut outs of pop culture and fashion and
color layered on top of each other into a cacophony of stuff, glowing under
the black light. Another sculpture looked like bits of bright and shiny party
trash surrounding a loop of Kate Upton doing the cat daddy, which is
basically all you need to know about the internet."
"There
it is folks, the art world in a single moment."
By Emily Colucci
Société Perrier
"From
posters of teen heartthrobs such as Matt Dillon pulsating with psychedelic
video and Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You," to
three-dimensional faces made from tacky plastic food to an entire day-glo
paint-splattered black light room filled with art, California-based artist Cameron Gray's wild, wacky and
wonderfully hallucinatory exhibition Birth of a Legend at the Mike Weiss Gallery is a hypnotic trip
into the visual overstimulation of the Internet age. Transforming the gallery
into a complete barrage of Pop references, flashing images, jerky gifs and
swirling sounds, Gray's exhibition not only reveals his deft mining of the
Internet, where every material in the show comes from, but also, the humor he
brings to representing this over-mediated void."
by Empty Lighthouse
"Gray's
works allow us to be everywhere at the same time and to have a multiple
conversation with everybody and everything. He makes sure that his visual
explosion enters your brain and stays there for good while offering the
possibility of a new universe and a whole different understanding of
communication."
"Artist
Cameron Gray might have been born in Geneva in 1980 or might have been born
in America in 1974, or might have not been born at all. He might, in fact,
come from the future to show us how we should understand our context and how
we should be handling the unnecessary, obsolete and obscene information that
surrounds our daily life. His proposition is the game, the changing of the
rules and the new perception: to be omniscience in a flat world and to play,
as if we where little gods of a little, tiny micro-cosmos."
By Odelle Abney
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