Thanks to everyone who came out on Friday to celebrate the opening of Gabriel Boyce and Preston Links’ “Breaking News”. Below are some highlights from the exhibit. The show runs through to October 31st. We are open on Saturdays from noon-5pm.
News Van – CNNBCBS.COM
From January 15th, 2009 up until last week Boyce and Link have been collaborating on artwork using news stories as their source of content. Upon entering the gallery note the gallery list has been laid out like a newspaper. Each piece is unlabeled in the gallery, which invites the viewer to read the newspaper/gallery list and then visually experience the story through the artists’ mindset. Fundamentally, the newspaper creates a direct interaction with the viewer. The moment you discover the artwork with the news story you begin to understand the news stories specific from your own experience to the point when you are viewing the artwork. As a result the viewer sees a completely disconnected perspective from the reality of the actual happening much like how you feel when you see the events passing on your television.
Left to right: cards and posters, Breaking Newspaper
From the news story of June 2009, “Air France: Missing Plane”, Boyce/Link construct an airplane using masonite and then simply cover the airplane with a blanket. (some might recognize that the blanket is one typically given out to passengers aboard an airplane.) By placing the object on the floor calls to mind a viewpoint from childhood, much like Mike Kelley’s sculptures that display children’s toys under blankets. The artwork also demonstrates a literal approach; the plane is there, but essentially, it is hidden. It also marks a consistent theme. The sculptures being laid low, made like toys, again reminds you of playing sprawled out on the floor or under a table.
Installed in our side gallery are news stories relating to natural disasters. In August of this year China was hit by a deadly typhoon named Morakot. Boyce and Link’s piece on Morakot is an interactive sculpture that invites the gallery goers to play using a familiar do it yourself science experiment, two soda bottles connected at the tops with a “Tornado Tube Connector“. Balancing the bottles on the the giant tipping “C” is an interaction in itself. This piece recounts light-heartedly the experience of a typhoon while indirectly making the viewer the destroyer.
Eventually the artwork begins to wear on the psyche as you read to the bottom of page 2 on the 2 page “Breaking Newspaper“, “Obituaries – see page 6″. Despite the comical approach the artists have chosen to depict, the news itself is depressing, even terrifying at times. Overall the exhibit creates a satire of the news much like comedies Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, SNL’s Weekly Update, The Daily Show with John Stewart, Family Guy, South Park and The Simpsons. By contrasting the humorous with the traumatic you begin see the news itself as a spectacle. A point of reference shared by many writers as well, such as George Orwell, Phillip K. Dick, Guy Debord or Douglas Adams who effectively use media to illustrate a degraded society.
I hope to see these pieces years from now when “The Miracle on the Hudson” might be totally forgotten, the artwork itself, a piece of ephemera from October 2009 and still I will laugh. We are at a point now where art history is passing at a faster rate, information travels quickly and knowledge can be made available at the click of a button. “Breaking News” effectively embodies these sentiments and invites us all to participate and remember what happened.
Installation view
*Anyone interested in collecting this artwork please remember that regardless of time this show will always be, “Breaking News”.
