Join us Thursday, July 19 at 7:30 p.m. for an exclusive gallery tour and artist talk with Brett Green and Robert Arbogast, moderated by Chief Curator Matt Leslie.
Robert Arbogast’s conceptually bifurcated prints aren’t merely digitally produced, but digitally activated in the gallery space. The prints can’t be fully perceived until the viewer parses the texts with a smartphone or tablet, becoming themselves a bodily extension of the framed work on the wall. Some sentiments are purely personal, others iconic writings from the English language canon. The virtual words imbue the layered QR code camouflaged patterns with nuanced meaning, often at odds with the starkly corporate overtones of the enlarged, opaque black and white code symbols.
Originally from Baltimore, Robert Arbogast received his MFA at the University of California, Irvine in the 1980’s. Mr. Arbogast will join the tour via Skype from his studio in St. Augustine, Florida.
Brett Green’s large scale paintings on unstretched fiberglass screens personalize the often overlooked humanity of both obscure and sensationalized vintage photographs. Ghost-like visage are repeated, or swim in seas of knots, like skeins of endless, meandering memories, refusing to disappear from our collective media unconscious. Like Robert Arbogast, Brett Green works in layers, often paintings the same image on two or even three semi-transparent fabric before suspending one in front of another. Seen from different angles, images project and recede into surfaces made even more unstable by the moray effect of light on screen.
Brett Green, who also earned his MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he was a classmate of Robert Arbogast, will be present for the tour.
Brett Green: The Last Hiding Place
June 21 – August 19
Gallery Tour
Thursday, July 19, 7:30 p.m.
A survey of works by the Southern California artist whose large scale paintings on unstretched canvas and multilayered fiberglass screens personalize the often overlooked humanity of both obscure and sensationalized vintage photographs.
ROBERT ARBOGAST, RUM AND COCA COLA, 2014, DIGITAL PRINT, 2” X 24”
Digital Diptychs by Robert Arbogast
June 21 – August 19
Gallery Tour
Thursday, July 19, 7:30 p.m.
Robert Arbogast’s literary themed digital diptychs incorporate outsized QR codes both as masks superimposed over photographic images and as active portals to hidden texts, revealed only by a QR code reader.