Crisp London Los Angeles

2010 | RICHARD WEARN

20 January – 27 February 2010
PRIVATE VIEW: Tuesday, 19 January, 6-8pm

CRISP presents the UK solo debut of Los Angeles-based artist, RICHARD WEARN.

Interested in future concepts of form and how these ideas of form reflect post-utopian understandings of the world, Wearn uses sculpture, image making and video to develop form that responds to the recent history of social and cultural resistance.

In Untitled, 2009, a tourist map of locations associated with the May 1968 uprising in Paris features sculptures temporarily installed in the 18 locations sited on the map – the sculptural interventions are documented on each site, including models of Gordon Matta-Clark’s House Divided, Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Wooden Shed, the first Mall constructed in America and the Tabernacle from John Borman’s 1973 science fiction cult movie, Zardoz. Collectively, the models construct a discursive space, neither absolutely defined, nor devoid of meaning, suggesting a variety of critical positions that deflect, and at times, combine with each other to form dialogues among themselves and the sites. The deconstructive, the entropic, the epistemological, and the hegemonic collide and redefine themselves within the history and nostalgia for resistance, dissent and opposition. The intervention took place in the space of a day as Wearn moved through Paris transporting the models, using history as a source for the development of an auto-poetic visual language representative of a practice that complicates modes of production and cultural histories.

Trouw (Fidelity), 2009, is a 30-minute dual screen rear projection video that investigates the semiotics of the built environment. The work documents a sign that sits atop a Brute Architecture building that formerly housed an Amsterdam based newspaper, Trouw. The Dutch Jewish resistance established Trouw during WWII to counter the Nazi occupation and extermination of Holland’s Jewish population. It is now a center left national newspaper – the building is currently occupied by squatters and regularly hosts underground concerts and raves. Trouw (Fidelity) documents the illumination of the sign during the transition from dusk to darkness. Using two fixed cameras, the piece was shot in one take simultaneously recording a front and rear view of the sign. For the duration of the piece the only apparent variance is the gradual change in light condition as the sun sets. This transition is abruptly disturbed by the activation of the sign. The majority of the piece captures the change in light condition as the sun sets. This temporal continuity is disrupted by the activation of the sign, thus creating an elliptical intervention on durational experience, rear projected and embedded in the wall in order to reference the presentation of painting. Subtle shifts in light occur until the documented sign is activated. The unchanging framing coupled with the nearly imperceptible change in light condition prior to the activation of the sign makes the work appear static. The work may be read as an animated painting as the durational qualities are submerged.

The traditional conditions of viewership of painting become an overlay of meaning, reflecting Wearn’s interest in the structures of meaning within the recent history of painting. It specifically pertains to a critical analysis of the work of Judd, Ruscha and McCahon, also exposes the complication of culturally specific meanings – presented to an English speaking public who will enter the piece by first inquiring into the meaning of the word, “trouw”.

By viewing contemporary modernity in ecological terms, our cities are the manifestation of this ecology. Urban rehabilitation and renewal reveals to us traces of our utopian mythologies, past and present. Wearn explores these mythologies by seeking clues and submerged information that exist within the semiotic embellishment of the built environment to highlight the existence of a post-utopian narrative embedded in the cities we occupy. The ideation of form, once understood as material meeting resistance, may now be viewed as a collection of ‘affects and percepts’ as suggested by Deleuze and Guattari. Even as Donald Judd presented format as form, his intention for form to act as a creative directness gave way to a physics and fantasy formulation.

RICHARD WEARN received an MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1996 and lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City; Arnoff Center for the Arts, Cincinnati, OH; Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA and Chinati/Donald Judd Foundation, Marfa, TX. In 2009, Richard Wearn was artist-in-residence at Agentur, Amsterdam, NL.

With special thanks to: