Lucas AjemianĀ“s performances, film installations, drawings and sculptures are based on integration, revision and de-articulation of found sources. The deconstruction of media specificities is typical: for example video stills are used to produce sculptures or films are generated from drawings and vice versa.
The original reference between image and reality becomes blurred by his intervention while remaining visible as a trace. Shining through these investigations into individual and collective authorship is often an ironic and humorous critique of political and social behavior.
Ajemian's new show at Parisa Kind gallery is a mixture of three related investigations into the filmic medium.
The centerpiece of the show, titled /Pageant/, is a 16mm Kodak Pageant projector from the 1950s that Ajemian disassembled, polished, and reassembled. The projector plays a loop of mirrored film, in effect not simply subverting but inverting or annulling the machine by reflecting its light back onto and into itself.
Ajemian describes this work as an introvert. Like the light filtering out from under a closed door or a lighthouse with mirrored windows, the sculpture does not convey anything other than the introverted glimmer of some sort of hidden, ruminative inner life.
This work is in turn accompanied by a series of drawings of a form that is as well repeated throughout the exhibition. These drawings were made on translucent sheets of Denril and are in effect hand-made copies of an otherwise offhanded sketch made in the studio - identical in form, but differentiated by the way in which the shapes are filled in with ink and pigment. The forms themselves are traced with aluminum tape, resembling the one used to make the film loop for Pageant. The drawings mimic the extracted frames of the film, but with a subtle mixture of control and playful experimentation with the graphic medium. As with many of Ajemian's recent works, the media he brings together are engaged in forms of dialogue whose parameters shift upon repeated engagement
Lucas Ajemian (b.1975, lives and works in New York City) has exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, Paris France, kirkhoff contemporary art, Copenhage, Daniel Hug Gallery, Los Angeles, and Fridericianum, Kassel. He will be included in the following exhibitions to come: "Eclipse: Art in a Dark Age" at Moderna Museet, Stockholm and "U-Turn Quadrennial for Contemporary Art" in Copenhagen.
This is Lucas Ajemians second solo exhibition at Galerie Parisa Kind after /Fake Black Book/ in 2005.
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Galerie Parisa Kind
Offenbacher Landstrasse 11-13 HH
(60599 Frankfurt
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Fax. +49-69-15247040
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