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13 May 2009 | |
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Stuart Semple | Everlasting Nothing Less
The London press preview of Stuart Semple's latest show -- Everlasting Nothing Less -- was a hit. The artist and his work have arrived on US soil -- New York to be exact -- to install the pieces for the opening this Saturday 05.16.09 at Anna Kustera. The show runs through 06.20.09. If you've followed Semple's career, I'm sure you'll agree with me when I say this is his best work yet, and I'm not just saying that because he's a dear friend. It's really good. Ever the barometer of popular culture, Semple's new show Everlasting Nothing Less charts the rise and fall of the reproduced image and human created spectacle. In Everlasting Nothing Less he adds a deeper, darker, and intriguingly beautiful dimension. Semple's painstaking attention to detail in his meticulous hand painting of what at first appear to be machine reproduced silkscreen halftones, not only alludes to mechanization in early examples of pop art but clearly display his preoccupation with retrieving items from mass culture in order to re-humanise them. Semple explains: "They pretend to be screen prints, just as screen prints pretended to be photos, and photos pretended to be life. For me that whole thing creates items that people invest belief in as if they were real but in fact aren't a true reflection of reality; they never will be! They are constructs, and the logical thing to do is to make another construct that shows the failing in the previous ones." Semple's compositions tell stories. "They all have an idea of a failed moment or the collapse of a particular situation," he says. "They occupy a place where the tragedy has happened, where atomization and individualism have reached a peak and the individual is literally stranded. Pop is very clever at presenting a myth of the immortal, but the 2nd law of thermodynamics clearly acts like a predictable clock, measuring the passage of time until everything equates." Make sure to stop by Anna Kustera on Saturday between 6 - 8pm for the opening. Everlasting Nothing Less
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