Perfect Strangers Daily Operation

This weekend is the last chance to see Perfect Strangers Daily Operation, the first show at Daily Operation. Send me an email if you'd like to stop by. The press release follows...

Perfect Strangers Daily Operation brings together eight artists for a special one-week exhibition. Representing a variety of current practices, these artists are comfortable being conflicted, ambiguous, and unrestricted. Rather than being didactic, each work operates as a kind of visual non sequitur where convention is borrowed and then displaced.

Patrick Brennan and Jasmine Justice each sustain a nonchalant approach to painting, but this approach reveals itself differently. Through layering, Brennan pits the decorative and crafty against the sensual and utterly esthetic. In Justice’s paintings, there is an initial appearance of completeness, which unravels slowly to uncover a playful and open-ended experimentation.

While unrelated in process, Gianna Commito and Jesse Hamerman each work with an anti-formulaic space. In Commito’s watercolors, a lyrical, soft-edge geometry intersects with meticulousness for perspectival, formal, and literal vagueness. Similarly vigorous, Hamerman reduces the signatures of public personas to sculpted, abstract line drawings, masking any referential content.

Aaron Steffes and Mark Stockton address the awkward nature of celebrity. Steffes envisions popular fiction writers transplanted from their book jackets into cramped apartments and surrounded by strange plants. Taken from sources like film stills and press photos, Stockton’s intimate and detailed portraits of well-known personalities simultaneously mimic, mock, and revere their subjects.

J.D. Walsh and Jaime Gecker carefully construct their arrangements of borrowed material, but they depart in their chosen subjects and manner of execution. Walsh uses a self-invented computer program that randomly generates text and images and projects them in rhythmic patterns onto wall constructions. Gecker photographs, dissects, and reconfigures film stills into paintings with miniaturized, conflated scenes with hazy narratives.















Images, from left to right, top to bottom:
Jaime Gecker, All time cut-up, 2008, photo transfer, latex and spray paint on canvas, 20" x 16"
Gianna Commito, untitled, 2008, casein and watercolor on panel, 10" x 9"
JD Walsh, Manual Blues, 2008, DVD derived from custom software, video, wood, metronome, dimensions variable
Aaron Steffes, Tom Clancy at my place on the eve of Baghdad’s liberation, 2008, ink on paper, 7" x 6"
Jesse Hamerman, My Signature Works (miss congeniality), 2008, foam, joint compound, paint, 31.5” x 21” x 2”
Patrick Brennan, untitled, 2008, acrylic, spray paint, and collage on canvas, 12" x 12"
Mark Stockton, Madonna I (After Lee Friedlander), 2008, graphite on BFK Rives, 6” x 4”
Jasmine Justice, untitled, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 20” x 10”







PSDO on Matthews the Younger.