April 29 - June 10, 2017

Locust Projects, Miami

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Locust Projects is pleased to present Under Water, a collaboration between New York-based artists David Kennedy Cutler, Michael DeLucia and David Scanavino. Their room-scale installation reinterprets a pastoral beach scene across two and three dimensions, with synthetic sun and moon rising over a pixelated ocean.

 

Evoking ambiguities of scale and dimension, the artists tile, wallpaper, and construct this environment with CNC-routed forms and computer-generated textures. The project’s distribution of labor reinforces a cross-media turbulence, where each artist contributes elements marked by their distinct, individual practices: DeLucia carves a giant tire, a surrogate for the sun, that emerges from a wave of plywood construction; Scanavino’s pattern of blue tiles hint at the cresting ocean; while a repeating motif of Cutler’s face, representative of the audience, directly confronts the impending wave. The scene as a whole is caught at the apex of its potential, suspended in time while pointing towards its possible aftermaths.

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Under Water plays with the artifice of representation in the digital age; the approximation of a copy to its original. To this end, the artists both embrace and resist what they call “post-truth materiality,” a phenomenon—largely catalyzed by digital technologies—where objects and materials are no longer necessarily what they appear. This thinking complements Austrian theorist Peter Weibel’s notion of the post-media condition where he lends distinct consideration to the computer, what he terms “the universal machine,” as the ultimate mimetic tool: It serves as a surrogate that can simulate the “abundance of possibilities” of any medium. At the center of Under Water is the question surrounding the instability of medium and material today as a direct byproduct of digital culture. This comes through particularly in how the artists locate the current topographies of creative enterprise:

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...where cheap images govern more and more space; where architecture begins to look more like the renderings used to speculate upon; where everything is under perpetual construction; where imaging, rendering, and digital proliferation have radically shifted our notion of the landscape.

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The project’s collaged scenery approximates an image editing or CAD workspace, where shapes, images, and textures intersect with the impulse and urgency of copy-and-paste terms. Through this work, the artists provoke an understanding of physical materials to be as shifting and unsettled as their digital counterparts. Under Water is a virtual landscape that imports its digitality into material space, subsumed within the fractured and multi-hyphenate divide between reality and its representation.