DEM PASSWORDS

Culled from his output over the last 10 months, Aimee Mann presents an expressive calligraphy system that uses variations in spacing between and within letters along with signature embellishments to encrypt McGraw's meditative subjects. Letters, words, phrases and proper names combine into a baroque labyrinth of stems, loops and ligatures which hide a personal journey. The title referring to the eight months McGraw spent scribing the musician's lyrics -- an evolution that followed a year of scribing the calendar date -- Aimee Mann also points to the musical quality of the work; his spacing policy creating resonant waves of text synced with flourishes that connect McGraw's spiritual dimension to the programmatic.

Installed here, the works can read like sentence fragments. "Constant," "Craving," "Shoveling it in." "Excuses", "Blown," "Down the Drain." McGraw's missives feel intimate despite what little we know of the backstories.

The magic of Aimee Mann springs from the tension between the formal constraints of McGraw's system and his instinct toward abstraction -- between his focused, conscious mind and an almost automatic performance. McGraw empties the text of its meaning as he drills down the page, adding layers of guilloche, processing emotions and information into objects of contemplation. Romantic and mathematical, McGraw's work is a log of inputs and external states and an expression of his inner most self.

Evan McGraw, born in 1990 and a graduate of Cooper Union, lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.



This exhibition was produced with the generous support of Industry Partners and Redcar Properties LTD.

After the attacks of 9/11, supply chains dispersing into New York City from conflict diasporas of the 'global South' were interdicted by a covert biopolitics of mobility deeply rooted in Cold War containments.

Diasporic migrants transiting into the city were captured by mobile policing regimes that imposed 21st century urban containments through next-generations technologies of command-and-control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

City of Redactions examines the legacy topographies of Cold War biopolitics that are presented as backstories for present-day chronicles of conflict diaspora. Superimposed onto the port city's sedimented narratives of control, Natsios' micro-cartographes challenge the global city's post 9/11 identity as nexus of hardened internal boundaries.

New York City's containments are Natsios' autobio(geo)graphic destination as well as her object of study. The City's diasporic geographies recapitulate her own peripatetic upbringing. During the Cold War's quarter century height, her father's stations as a senior officer of the CIA clandestine service mobilized the transient family beneath the redactions of capital cities in seven foreign countries across three continents. Among these lived sites, the Cold War topographies of Greece, Korea and Vietnam have become keys to Natsios's decryptions.

City of Redactions builds on Deborah Natsios' longtime collaboration with John Young -- as New York City architects and co-founders in 1996 of Cryptome, the open access online library that challenges secrecy's regime of the covert, redacted and excluded: "Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance -- open, secret and classified documents -- but not limited to those."

http://www.city-of-redactions.org

- text by Deborah Natsios

W&L consider the territory of the club where these Bears have been placed as a liminoid for potential customization. The detritus of disaster is reclaimed to form an antidote to the mundane. Bad behavior remaps the social codes of nightlife. These flyers list demands and promises the way all flyers demand and promise access and privilege. In Revenge we're seduced by text that reads "PIG ROAST" while a tiny cop awaits his fate in a jar. On the Insecurity flyer we seem to be at a club in the desert along a country's border where "DORAS DRINK FREE" and there is "NO COVER." All the flyers offer "Keys 2the Khroma Klub," a distinct realm of BOY'Dega where the cast revel in the ruins of General Idea's Chroma Key Club.

These durables push the typical layered visuals seen in actual club flyers over the edge of good taste. The images are variously pierced with digital grommets, threaded with diamond necklaces, scaffolded with gold-studded planks, scarred with text, split and then re-bound with trompe-l'oeil laces. The gay hosts are under decorative assault and repair and the viewer is invited to deal directly with the superficial - to "get into it" or get out.

Across from these four flyers hangs the largest work in the exhibition, a 23' (701cm) diagram: The Cave. Simply put, it is a digital club that rests idly on a flatbed truck. (A set piece from episodes 4-10 in transit to the backlot? A place designed perhaps for the BOY'Dega cast to enjoy?) Outside The Cave the night sky is filled with anecdotes, rumors, and gossip about the artists' practice - "BOND SALON was the easiest work we ever made."

In the smaller back room of the gallery, rendered heads of our four hosts float inside their vitrines. ID cards reveal their assets and their talking points. There's no time to determine whether this is the coveted VIP booth or a green room, a memorial or a rehearsal; the bar is flooding nearby. It is into this space - between the real and the imagined, the character and the actor, the fan and creator - that Wickerham & Lomax project their art experience; the artworks providing a sort of systems analysis of the layered architecture that defines their digital and physical output.

Wickerham & Lomax is the collaborative name of Baltimore-based artists Malcolm Lomax (b. 1986, Abbeville, South Carolina) and Daniel Wickerham (b. 1986, Columbus, Ohio). Formerly known as DUOX, the two have been working together since 2009. W&L have developed a searching, nuanced practice that applies a keen critical intuition and fine-tuned irreverence to the problems and potentialities of our contemporary media ecology. Working across diverse media, curatorial platforms, and institutional contexts, they have created a body of work at once context-specific and broadly engaged with networked virtualities. W&L are particularly invested in questions of identity and the body, exploring the impact - profound, ubiquitous, ambivalent - of digital technologies and social spaces on the formation of subjectivities and speculative corporealities. Recent exhibitions by Wickerham & Lomax include the premiere of Encore in the AFTA LYFE at the Artists Space booth, Frieze NY (2014) and BOY'Dega: Edited4Syndication for New Museum's First Look series (2014). Other solo shows include DUOX4Larkin, Artists Space, New York (2012); Liste Exhibition, Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore (2011); Break My Body, Hold My Bones, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, New York (2011); MoMT: Museum of Modern Twink, GLCCB bookstore, Baltimore (2010); and King Me, Open Space Gallery, Baltimore (2009).

An online companion piece to this exhibition can be found here... http://www.duoxduox.com/boyd/girth-proof

"I'm coming to make all my fans in America laugh."

(The Death of Baphomet audio clip - 0:05) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6RkbSXopPw

But Perry is also coming to, "...give all of the American dollars to UBS bank and send famine to United States of America...famine without end."

(The Death of Baphomet audio clip - 0:16) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5DsHopqfhI

A master of technologies and aesthetics both high and low, Perry deploys humor and punk sensibility with his hands and feet directly to the canvas forming the circuit through which a creative energy courses back 50+ years. In direct relation to a decades long love affair with American culture, Perry continues to crack his "serious joke" as a legit master of media mania.

The Death of Baphomet presents 4 interrelated output styles - writings, spell casting paintings, assemblages and video. The mirrors he's long since Pattexed (glued) to his hats and boots have been enlarged and get full treatment. Perry's pre-stretched canvases stack vertically forming a kind of shattered crucifix affixed with photos of himself and clippings from German magazines. Stones, coconuts and Spencer's Gifts detritus come together to form object collages. An unabridged dictionary thick volume of Perry's writings in Microsoft Word from 2007 published in an edition of 3 by this gallery contains over 1,000 pages of original epic poetry that Perry pecked out with his index finger.

Lee Perry has never met Jay-Z even though in 2003 Jay-Z rapped over a sample of Perry's 1976 production with Max Romeo, "Chase the Devil."

Jay-Z, "Lucifer" - 3:14
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PdjOUGzF7g

Lee Perry, "Disco Devil" (Lee Perry remix of "Chase the Devil" - 8:12)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbb192bVGAU

Perry isn't chasing the devil anymore. He knows exactly where he is and he's coming to America to hammer Baphomet and his Illuminati puppets to death.

Lee "Scratch" Perry, 77, lives and works in Einsiedeln, Switzerland.

(The Death of Baphomet art show video preview - 8:29) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1GnhgV7YHU

For further inquiries contact Sebastian Demian - 772.202.2733 - sebastian@dempasswords.com

Lead image photo by Volker Schaner.

In the spirit of the Trecartin/Fitch design heritage, Lord has color-blocked the walls of the gallery using a CMYK scheme. On the cyan East facing wall are "Missing Poster" and "Stock Certificate". The magenta South facing wall holds "Palimpsest" and on the west facing yellow wall, "Blueprint". In this order, the paintings consider culture, currency, language and reason, respectively.

"Missing Poster" is emblematic of the schema Lord accesses throughout: assembling layer content into forward facing layers representing Trecartin's concept of the "Superposition" and backward facing layers representing our linear time-based reality. These flipped perspectives appear in all of Lord's multi-level narratives but are most visible in the "Palimpsest" painting where Lord depicts a global etymology of the phrase, "it's all Greek to me," another play on referential identity. As a considered counterweight to the apparent chaos contained herein, Lord makes a call to reason through the painterly application of elements including the Vitruvian man, geometric proofs and hand lettering.

Lord's work is about multi-dimensionality, the process of thought, and intertextuality. Anchored in the tension between mania and focus, the rational and the ridiculous, utility and art, Lord's paintings connect various nodes of experience back to the beauty of consciousness, into a zone a computer can't access.

Rachel Lord, 27, lives and works in Los Angeles and holds a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Review:
http://dismagazine.com/blog/65087/rachel-lord/

Sam's enthusiastic adoption of his father's techniques has established, along with his sister Alpha's work, a family method that approaches painting with paper and glue. Leveraging the randomness provided by their vintage starting materials and producing with an "art is work" approach to image making, Beach creates collages that take a decidedly narrative tone and structure while Lubicz's pieces ring more musical and exuberant. Beach's collages are mostly figurative, mini narratives whose titles echo his work as a fiction writer while Lubicz's output is inflected by his ongoing work as a member of the 333 Boyz music production team.

Hitting notes ranging from Monty Python to Hannah Hoch and with a psychic indebtedness to the Blues and sample-based electronic music, the family's work is advancing the spirit of West Coast rebel image making Beach has championed and succeeded in interfacing broadly with the mainstream consciousness across 4 decades. Few have taken collage this far and still fewer have the craftsman chops and compositional instinct Beach has honed and now passed on to Sam. Beach is creating work in what is certainly the most exciting phase of his personal practice and Sam's embrace of his father's stylistic legacy and practical encouragement that his dad return to the physical realm of cutting and pasting in 2006 after nearly a decade of almost exclusive digital production is taking the Lubicz family collage legacy into dynastic territory.

This is Beach and Lubicz's third show in cahoots. Beach has exhibited works at galleries including Billy Shire Fine Arts, OffRamp in Pasadena and Adventureland in Chicago and with Sam at galleries including La Luz De Jesus and Nickelodeon Studios in Burbank.