Post Culture

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to announce Post Culture, a group exhibition that features intergenerational artistic strategies in a time of relative, variant and abundant image dissemination. Exploring various actual and imagined subtexts--pre and post digital reality, the dematerialization of narrative, co-authorship, mass consciousness and social evidence, works in the exhibition explore various artistic and political responses to notions of reality and time.  Focusing on delivery versus demonstration, Post Culture further assesses a variety of perspectives active in the United States and Europe at a transitional moment. 

London based artist Gabriele Beveridge states “The past is, now and forever, a draft for the future.” Taking deep interest in the contradiction of images, her sculptural assemblages are a poetic illumination around the politics of display and illusions of naturalism, gender and the unconscious.

As user-generated content has become a core part of American culture in the preceding decade, ceaseless proliferation of socially shared footage posted on the Internet has provided a rich, fertile source of inspiration for the Belgian collective Leo Gabin. Their social online collecting resulting in inventive paintings that incorporate digital screenprint practices has led to critical and uncanny reflections on post-internet notions of reality, branding and identity.

Tamar Halpern’s hybrid practice negates notions of the digital archive, incorporating fragmentary analog and digital content in a highly physical process of photographing, collaging, painting, ripping, masking and displacing in works that defy classification. Effectively suspending tensions between dematerialization, replication, abstraction and signification, Halpern’s post-production strategies uphold integrity of the process and it’s visceral effects. 

Miranda Lichtenstein’s interest in the screen’s omnipresent dominance in our computerized visual field has become the subject of her Screen Shadow series of recent years. Staging papers and objects as dividers of light and shadow, Lichtenstein uses the apparatus of the camera and elemental forms of photography to explore the larger philosophical and theoretic issues around photographic representation. 

Copenhagen based artist Torben Ribe’s practice offers possible solutions and situations contextualizing media and advertising images in his work, addressing the potential of these forms. His use of iPhone catalogs, plastic trees, video game posters and hologram stock photos intentionally underperform in a non-tautological methodology. 

For over three decades, Julia Wachtel has actively pioneered the first works addressing the impact of “reality” in the media saturated age of the 1980s. The successive impact of this moment marked the introduction of her ongoing American Color series, dealing with the new genre of confessional television, which began in 1992 and is represented in this exhibition. Wachtel’s practice of media and celebrity culture set her apart from the Pictures Generation and is a notable precursor to the digital age. Her work is strikingly relevant today as she continues to approach political and social media content, embracing the conflict that these digital forms often represent.