Mark Price . Hyper 20XX . Feb. 09 – Mar. 04, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 18, 2012
Gallery Contact: David Kesting, Gallery Director . 212.334.0204
MARK PRICE’S GRAPHIC EXPLOSIONS SIGNAL CHAOS IN A TERRITORY BEYOND SCIENCE FICTION.
NEW YORK – January 18, 2012 – KESTING/RAY is pleased to present Hyper 20XX, the second New York solo exhibition for Philadelphia-based artist Mark Price. In a new series of meticulously-cut and super-color-saturated collages incorporating screenprinting, painting and photography, Price packs multiple moments into single frames stuck in the endless loop of an inescapable present. The exhibition opens on February 9th and runs through March 4th. A reception will be held on Thursday, February 9th, 7–9pm at KESTING/RAY (formerly CHRISTINA RAY), located at 30 Grand Street, New York.
Price’s work speaks to a deep-seated human fear of groundlessness and change. We seek stability and a world we recognize as sane and reliable, and Price’s work won’t give it to us. Instead he offers incomplete warnings of a shattered future in day-glow gestures that pierce the picture plane, flattening it into odd shapes that we strain to recognize. A silhouetted character appears from time to time in the work, functioning as a reminder of the fragmentary and incomplete nature of consciousness.
In Price’s installation, our own experience can no longer be trusted. The high-resolution screen through which we view things has shattered into stuttering and razor-sharp regions of color and text. Pierced and pinned to the wall as fragmentary bits of a larger situation, his collages emerge into a three-dimensional plane that feels tentative, vulnerable and hyper-real. Philosopher Paul Virilio, in describing the global financial crisis, touches on this atmosphere when he states, “We have moved from the stage of the acceleration of History to that of the acceleration of the Real. This is what ‘progress’ is: a consensual sacrifice.”
In 2011, Price spent months traveling throughout the US and India to deepen his experience of non-linear perception. In describing this time he notes, “In not having a fixed home base, I began to understand a new kind of stillness that comes from being perpetually in motion. Whether on a bike or train or plane, I found comfort from the mode of constant acceleration and the knowledge that everything remains open and inconclusive.”
As Maxwell Neely-Cohen describes in the exhibition catalogue, “Price’s visual world consists of both appropriated scenes and personal machinations of pure imagination. In it are fragments of collected, distorted, and replicated artifacts—an arrangement of shadows in a parking garage, the sinister implications of a computer error message, and the menacing pattern of caution paint at a Hong Kong toll plaza…The result of this combination is a hypnotic tour of where our psychological and information architecture collide. Hyper 20XX is an invitation to traverse through territories of accelerating obsolescence, cities and lands both known and unknown— to stare at screaming neon placards of our collective fears and then to gaze into depicted voids that somehow resonate with boundless energy—and remain unscathed.”
Mark Price (b. 1981, Detroit) lives and works in Philadelphia. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. In 2009 his work was selected by curator Aaron Betsky for inclusion in the internationally recognized Confines exhibition at the Institut Valencia d’Art Modern. Price has held one solo exhibition at CHRISTINA RAY in New York. He is a member of the Philadelphia-based artist collective Space 1026.
KESTING / RAY is an innovative gallery and creative catalyst in New York whose mission is to discover and advance the most important contemporary artists transforming concepts of space and identity. For more information, visit www.kestingray.com.
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 09, 7–9pm
Exhibition Dates: February 09–March 04, 2012
Location: 30 Grand Street, Ground Floor . Hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm
Directions: A/C/E to Canal Street or 1 to Canal Street; gallery is located between Thompson Street and 6th Avenue
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