Opening reception: Saturday, September 13, 4 - 6 pm
Jenny Jaskey Gallery is pleased to announce the group exhibition WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG includes work from James Hyde, Summer Kemick, Sungmi Lee, Avery McCarthy, Colin Montgomery, and Paul Salveson.Titled after the computing acronym for “what you see is what you get,” this exhibition examines abstract photography made through an interdisciplinary approach. It features six artists who are equally informed by music, sculpture, painting, graphic design and science as they are by the photography. Far from any notion of pure abstraction, the works in the exhibition are “dirtied” by other practices and disciplines, often making abstract what is found in the everyday.
James Hyde defies the flatness of photographic prints by making use of sculptural and painterly strategies. Hyde applies paint and attaches objects to photographs of scaffolding and other architectural forms, highlighting the rhythmic and musical qualities of the composition. Seemingly improvisatory, the aural and visual combine and recombine to synesthetic affect.
Summer Kemick’s installation of snapshot-sized prints made in her native Hawaii forms a cloud of vibrant color and textures. The arrangement of successive images suggests the drama of a narrative arc without any explicit meaning, stemming from a place of memory and ebullience.
An artist who mainly works in sculpture and installation, Sungmi Lee has recently been taking pictures from her studio window. Rather than document urban space, her images capture the atmosphere and shadow play of New York’s gray winters. Spumes of steam merge with the overcast sky to produce near monochromes and road markings form striated drawings.
Avery McCarthy presents a series of black-and-white contact prints called The Theory of Everything. Lifting scientific imagery from various online sources, McCarthy uses a systemic approach that finds equivalence among atoms, neurons, viruses, cosmic bodies, and mathematical models.
Colin Montgomery’s photograph made specifically for the exhibition creates a network of foam and spray taken from images of a boat’s wake. Almost sculptural in form, the large-scale print alludes to both the microscopic and the cosmic. This broad vision is fitting for an age in which seemingly benign travel can have global climatic impact.
Paul Salveson’s black-and-white photographs are informed by DIY ‘zines and role playing games. Salveson’s prints were made with the intention of being cheaply reproducible via desktop laser printers or photocopying machines where mid-tones are often abandoned for the high contrast grit of true black and white.
WYSIWYG is organized by Christopher Y. Lew. Christopher Y. Lew is Manager of Curatorial Affairs at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. He has recently curated Aljira Emerge 9 at Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art and co-curated Salad Days III at Artists Space. Lew is also co-organizer of Altered, Stitched and Gathered (2007) at P.S.1. The former Managing Editor of Art AsiaPacific, he has written for a number of magazines and exhibition catalogues. Lew lives in New York City.
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