The Gospel of Lead
Dario Robleto and Jeremy Blake
January 21 - March 12, 2006
(Preview Reception: January 20, 8-10 pm)
Curated by Regine Basha and organized by Arthouse. This exhibition is supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Austin Ventures and the Texas Commission on the Arts.
The Gospel of Lead is an exhibition that brings together, through a collaborative engagement, the recent work of Dario Robleto and Jeremy Blake.
Gospel of Lead, installion view of Room One
Photo Copyright: Paul Bardagy
Dario Robleto and Jeremy Blake continually push the limits of sculpture and painting/digital media, respectively. Robleto’s sculptures, concocted with a mix of unlikely, rare ingredients listed on the accompanying labels, purport a form of time-travel as various elements are alchemically combined, forming a sculptural amalgam of the past, present and future. Commonly used elements include melted or crushed vinyl records, lead from Civil War bullets, and crushed bone dust from every bone in the human body. Robleto recently completed a trilogy of sculptural works entitled Southern Bacteria, relating to war, the physical embodiment of nostalgia, and the haunting wounds of violence in American history.
For Arthouse, Robleto re-mixes a selection of works from Southern Bacteria, along with a number of new works, to create a dialogue with Jeremy Blake’s own recent trilogy, Winchester, based on The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. The entire trilogy, a suite of animations comprised of hand-painted imagery, film footage, vector graphics, and composed sound, in a process the artist calls "time-based painting," was recently presented as part of a solo exhibition at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The pairing of Robleto and Blake is particularly resonant as their bodies of work share affinities in their investigation of pop mythology, historical phenomenon and memory.
In these recent works in particular, Robleto and Blake explore the history of violence and its psychological effects in America. The Winchester Mystery House, a bizarre 160-room 19th-century Victorian mansion built by heiress Sarah Winchester, is an architectural wonder born out of a creative dementia and a desperate attempt to accommodate the ghosts of those killed by the rifles that made the Winchester name famous. The Gospel of Lead then becomes another chapter in the historical narrative of the Winchester House. The exhibition invokes a parallel reality by imagining what objects and ephemera might have actually inhabited this uniquely American place.
A full-color catalog featuring essays written by curator Regine Basha and Los Angeles-based critic, Michael Duncan, accompanies the exhibition.
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