Oliver Laric

Join us for a solo show by Berlin, Germany-based artist Oliver Laric. Laric is known for diffusing the boundaries between technological, legal, archaeological and artistic fields through different media like sculpture and video. In his research-oriented practice, Laric evinces the layers of mediation between a sculpture, a story or an image, and the subsequent versions it generates as it is digested in time, perception and economy.

Since anyone with a smartphone has become an accelerated source of image production, distribution and alteration, the questions posed by the artist about the futility of authorship are increasingly urgent. Laric’s claim that we understand visual culture as something unstable, continuously under construction and ever negotiating between the human and the non-human, challenges most fields in contemporary life.

The exhibition is a specific reading of Laric’s recent video work. In the first part of the Experimental Gallery, there are two synchronized videos, projecting updated cuts of his "Versions" videos on opposite walls. "Versions" is an ongoing essayistic project that juxtaposes recurrent and recirculated image sequences working as vignettes in combination with the voice-over of an actress emulating the robotic sound of text-to-speech software. In her narration, the voice uses extracts from texts by Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruce Lee and James Brown, by way of Lyn Collins, Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock. The second part of the gallery features an updated cut of "Untitled," perhaps Laric’s most iconic work to date. In this video, Laric draws on animation from different times to create a concatenation of morphing characters, body parts, furniture, monsters and so on. The animation sequence is interrupted by 3-D modeled anthropomorphic machines and tools, and occasionally images that are being digitally constructed. The soundtrack, specifically designed for the piece, oscillates from melancholic piano compositions to low frequency buzzing notes to complete each vignette.

For Laric, there is no definitive means of categorization or purity in the realm of images, since most of the time we encounter incarnations of the precursor before we experience the source. He rather advocates for the understanding of image production as something that is fluid and a constant negotiation between producers, regulators and consumers.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website