Blixa Bargeld

An exhibition of video, drawing, painting and photography examining domestication and dislocation, the artists included in this exhibition find solace in the unlikeliest of places. From hotel bathrooms to media iconography, these artists bring us to the brink of familiarity only to have that sensation revealed as déjavu. Without irony these artists struggle to make sense of a world filled with icons and sound-bytes.

Blixa Bargeld presents serialbathroomdummyrun, a selection from photographs of hotel bathrooms that he has been taking for twelve years while touring with the bands Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Einstuerzende Neubauten. Revealing an evolving failure of the hospitality industry to infinitely recreate an intimate yet generic architectural space, Bargeld describes the project as an "attempt to cover the monotony with a net, to hold onto something in the continous turning of this gear, to make the repetitions a part of myself, to fill them with purpose."

Bjørn Melhusí projected video, AutoCenterDrive, intimately set around a campfire, consists of fragmentary quotations between Jim Morrison and James Dean excerpted from "East of Eden", "Rebel Without a Cause" and the recording of Morrisonís "The American Prayer". Both parts are played by the artist utilizing appropriated dialog that creates an uneasy, fractured form of communication. Summoning associations with cowboy romanticism or with dramatic development that reaches a predictable peak, this work posits the space of media as the True American Frontier. Behind every good news anchor there is a globe, icon of worldliness and relevance.

Sari Carel takes these network globes as the subject for her paintings, slowing down the media through the traditional relationship between viewer and painting Her work considers this iconography of complete visibility, control and authority on reality and subsequently its interpretation. By heightening the ambiguity of these world globes, the artist undermines their coherence and agenda, asserting the gap between a map and what it is rendering, between theory and practice, between an image and its meaning.

Juan Gomez's graphic drawings of copulating couples reference Mayan drawings and Japanese erotic drawings, transforming the profane into the humane. Codependence, vulnerability, despair, empowerment and independence are effectively and economically depicted in these simple and fluid ink on rice paper drawings. They movingly subvert the tendency of style to dissipate meaning.

Sari Carel

Jaun Gomez

Bjørn Melhus