May 2 – June 7, 2008
Opening reception:
Friday, May 2, 2008
6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
ClampArt is proud to announce “Scenapse,” an exhibition of new photographs by artists, Aziz + Cucher.
For the past fifteen years, the artistic collaborative, Aziz + Cucher (Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher), has been producing work that challenges notions of medium specificity, blurring traditional boundaries dividing photography from painting and sculpture. Having already explored such art historic genres as the nude, portraits, architecture, and interiors in previous series, Aziz + Cucher’s most recent work focuses upon the landscape.
The exhibition,“Scenapse,” includes work from the ongoing project, “Synaptic Bliss”—a group of photographs that suggest surfaces are not solid, but rather permeable. First using digital technologies to break down straightforward camera-based imagery, Aziz + Cucher then re-build their scenes to create a deliberate tension between the photographic and the graphic. In these works, the pixel is highly pronounced not only to highlight the technological aspect of the process, but also to point to the fact that the world, like the body, is constructed of tiny particles and elements. The essence of everything can ultimately be reduced to nothing more than the proton, neutron, and electron, and we, as human beings, are part of that synchronicity of nature. The images from “Synaptic Bliss” suggest the potential of one’s body flowing through the surface of things to become physically enmeshed with the world.
Aziz + Cucher’s artwork is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; Martin Z. Margulies Collection, Miami; Maison Europeene de la Photographie, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Denver Museum of Art, Colorado; among many, many others.