Reception

1/9/2010 5:00pm - 7:00pm

Artist Talk with Anthony Discenza

2/6/2010 2:00pm

Catharine Clark Gallery is pleased to present Everything Will Probably Work Out Ok, a new solo exhibition by Oakland-based artist Anthony Discenza. The exhibition dates are January 7 through February 13, 2010, with a reception for the artist Saturday, January 9, from 5 to 7pm. This is Discenza’s second solo exhibit with the gallery and includes new media work in sound, video, and both two- and three-dimensional text-based projects. A catalogue based on the artist’s series of street signs will be available. For more images and information visit www.cclarkgallery.com

Long known for his complex, provocative abstractions assembled from appropriated television shows and films, Discenza here largely turns his attention to the relationship between text and image. In a suite of 2D and media-based works, Discenza plays with the deployment of various commonplace textual systems—such as lists, similes, acronyms, and verbal descriptions—as cues for the production of transient scenarios that unfold in the viewer's head. A series of “street signs”—installed both within the gallery and outside—display mysterious and often humorous messages. A new audio installation, Untitled (The Effect), stitches together material from many different sources to construct a description of a hallucinatory sequence of images assembled from fragments of texts gathered by searching Google for instances of a specific phrase. A disembodied voice narrates this text in which a stream of visual material and situations is described in fluid and continuously shifting terms. Dense and hypnotic, the work is at once an exploration of the limits of textual representation and a meditation on the collapse of meaning in an information-saturated age.

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