July 4 - September 28, 2008
Yukon Teruya, Jonathan Seiliger
The Japanese-born, Brooklyn-based artist Yuken Teruya’s exquisitely cut trees, excised from the paper bags of fast food, luxury goods and other multi-nationals use the ephemeral qualities of light and shadow to cast a new view on consumption and the environment. He begins with photographs of trees, which he transfers to his computer, superimposing this image on the logoed side of a bag. Using the original shape as a guide, he deftly cuts a two-part silhouette – lower branches/trunk and leafy top – folding and twisting the two halves into the interior of the bag, rooting the trunk with a single drop of glue.
Jonathan Seliger works with paint and canvas composed in three-dimensional structures in real, enlarged or abstracted scales that serve as representations of industrial and commercial packages including high and low end shopping bags, among other cast-offs of popular culture. Drawing from the long history of tromp l’oeil and painting-as-object, Seliger works with a unique process that involves painting much of the work as a flat canvas and later creating the folds or curves in a painstaking way in order to resemble a given commercial prototype. Like Teruya, Seliger’s practice (rooted in the realm of the meticulously handmade and the highly ubiquitous nature of the packages and objects that he typically portrays) provides a way of seeing the accessories of consumption as the objects of consumption.
