Cell Phones Diagrams Cigarettes Searches and Scratch Cards
Metro Pictures, New York
Mar. 3 - Apr. 11, 2009
For this show, Oursler presents a variety of new works that take on technology, obsessive desires, phobias, socially acceptable addiction, and self-help culture. Large works feature Pop-inspired, outsized sculptural versions of everyday objects. They include an 8-foot long five-dollar bill with an eerily animated Abe Lincoln, a bottle featuring the artist as a modern-day genie, an enormous cell phone spewing disjointed snippets of conversations and a group of stark white columns transformed into a forest of smoldering cigarettes. These will be joined with a series of miniature architectural-model tableaux illuminated with projected performers that enact scripted existential dramas. Wall pieces that combine video and painting are inspired by image juxtapositions from internet searches and browser windows. Tony Oursler lives and works in New York and has had numerous project and survey exhibitions in institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Musee de Jeu de Paume, Paris. He will present a show of new work at the Kunsthaus Bregenz later this year.