Sean Dack
24 May - 05 Jul 2008
SEAN DACK
"Ghost Hardware"
May 24 - July 5, 2008
Daniel Reich Gallery is very pleased to present a new solo exhibition by Sean Dack, Ghost Hardware, featuring new photographs and sculpture.
Sean Dack’s new photographs expound upon Dack’s pursuit of the cryptography of digital images and the unpredicted errors intrinsic to their transmission. Malformed and missing crucial “blocks” of data, such images belie the digital nature of our illusionistic virtual world: abrasive ruptures while watching a DVD (causing one to manually tap the player) or while loading an image in ones computer Browser. Rendered in dubiously pop CMYK cyans, hot pinks and electric blues: Dack’s partially decipherable subjects appear dynamic and mobile. Yet since digital “glitches,” tangle and halt the flow of information, Dack’s “stopped” images seem to express an isolated impersonal world. This impersonal world is hermetic - outside of the orbit of the world at large - enclosed in the obsessive-compulsive space of computer screen work and folly. A helicopter hovers, the ostentatious rounded terraces of a postmodern hotel signify grotesque vacuous luxury, and the faces of glamorous women are obscured by formal pixel blocks. As the resolution of digital images has improved in a few decades, the appearance of the evident square of the pixel is nostalgic yet tinged with the recollection of non-user-friendly computing: not completely enveloping computing distinguished by its imperfect pixilated line and the healthy differentiation between daily life which is merely mapped instead of replicated. As Dack’s colors are garish, his pixels are aesthetically dubious: evocative of early “computer drawing” and “poor taste” is also at issue in Dack’s work. And yet Dack’s glossy prints are formal and function sculpturally as seductive reflective slabs. In this way, there are aspects of Jacques Derrida’s concept of “hauntology”. As Derrida“s theory of “hauntology” has recently been ascribed to music and popular culture, it is the glimmering, shimmering and suggested - a quality attributable to Dack’s prints and sculptures. In the distant “reality” “obscured” by Dack’s formal pixel stripes, there is a heady mystery in terms of indecipherable action beneath the pixels, the color and the gloss of the print. And in the midst of a day-glow palate, there is foreboding and blocky subsumed death as though one is among bright ghosts and half rendered covert actions. Yet this same day-glow formal block quality has a modish goofy celebratory insouciance in rambling irregular staggered bars of information.
The loss of capacity to relay meaning is also captured in Dack’s excellent Ghost Hardware sculptures in attractive candy primary colors. These works are John McCracken-like: cast in bright hues making the oblongs of obsolete stereo components (tape deck, multi disk c.d. changer etc.) into formal sculptures. While their largess, once made them enticing objects emblematic of auditory superiority, they now have a mute slab like quality albeit bright yet bleak in their import.
Recently, Dack participated in “The Hidden” at Maureen Paley in London. His solo show at Fred Snitzer Gallery in Miami was exceptionally received. In the past year, he has exhibited at the Moore Space, The Moscow Biennial, and in a Peter Coffin curated exhibition at Frank Elbaz in Paris. Last summer Dack produced the book Future Songs as a mail exhibition in conjunction with Daniel Reich Gallery. Dack has also exhibited at Hiromi Yoshi in Tokyo and will be included in “The Future as Disruption” at The Kitchen this summer.
"Ghost Hardware"
May 24 - July 5, 2008
Daniel Reich Gallery is very pleased to present a new solo exhibition by Sean Dack, Ghost Hardware, featuring new photographs and sculpture.
Sean Dack’s new photographs expound upon Dack’s pursuit of the cryptography of digital images and the unpredicted errors intrinsic to their transmission. Malformed and missing crucial “blocks” of data, such images belie the digital nature of our illusionistic virtual world: abrasive ruptures while watching a DVD (causing one to manually tap the player) or while loading an image in ones computer Browser. Rendered in dubiously pop CMYK cyans, hot pinks and electric blues: Dack’s partially decipherable subjects appear dynamic and mobile. Yet since digital “glitches,” tangle and halt the flow of information, Dack’s “stopped” images seem to express an isolated impersonal world. This impersonal world is hermetic - outside of the orbit of the world at large - enclosed in the obsessive-compulsive space of computer screen work and folly. A helicopter hovers, the ostentatious rounded terraces of a postmodern hotel signify grotesque vacuous luxury, and the faces of glamorous women are obscured by formal pixel blocks. As the resolution of digital images has improved in a few decades, the appearance of the evident square of the pixel is nostalgic yet tinged with the recollection of non-user-friendly computing: not completely enveloping computing distinguished by its imperfect pixilated line and the healthy differentiation between daily life which is merely mapped instead of replicated. As Dack’s colors are garish, his pixels are aesthetically dubious: evocative of early “computer drawing” and “poor taste” is also at issue in Dack’s work. And yet Dack’s glossy prints are formal and function sculpturally as seductive reflective slabs. In this way, there are aspects of Jacques Derrida’s concept of “hauntology”. As Derrida“s theory of “hauntology” has recently been ascribed to music and popular culture, it is the glimmering, shimmering and suggested - a quality attributable to Dack’s prints and sculptures. In the distant “reality” “obscured” by Dack’s formal pixel stripes, there is a heady mystery in terms of indecipherable action beneath the pixels, the color and the gloss of the print. And in the midst of a day-glow palate, there is foreboding and blocky subsumed death as though one is among bright ghosts and half rendered covert actions. Yet this same day-glow formal block quality has a modish goofy celebratory insouciance in rambling irregular staggered bars of information.
The loss of capacity to relay meaning is also captured in Dack’s excellent Ghost Hardware sculptures in attractive candy primary colors. These works are John McCracken-like: cast in bright hues making the oblongs of obsolete stereo components (tape deck, multi disk c.d. changer etc.) into formal sculptures. While their largess, once made them enticing objects emblematic of auditory superiority, they now have a mute slab like quality albeit bright yet bleak in their import.
Recently, Dack participated in “The Hidden” at Maureen Paley in London. His solo show at Fred Snitzer Gallery in Miami was exceptionally received. In the past year, he has exhibited at the Moore Space, The Moscow Biennial, and in a Peter Coffin curated exhibition at Frank Elbaz in Paris. Last summer Dack produced the book Future Songs as a mail exhibition in conjunction with Daniel Reich Gallery. Dack has also exhibited at Hiromi Yoshi in Tokyo and will be included in “The Future as Disruption” at The Kitchen this summer.