Please join us this weekend, Saturday, April 4th for the opening of OFF THE SHELF. OFF THE SHELF is a solo exhibition by Luke Newton, a young British artist currently living and working in Paris. This show will be his debut solo exhibition in the United States. The exhibit will include new works by Newton and several large scale installations.
OFF THE SHELF presents a lighthearted satirical assessment of what it is to live in a commercially and technologically driven society. Newton recalls DuChamp with his use of appropriation to unshackle factory made utilitarian wares into hand-made pieces of art. Taking these everyday items and ideas on which we depend, Newton re- makes them into sleek vibrant artworks, devoid of functionality. He disconnects these pieces from their intended roles, inflates their aesthetic value, and places them in a gallery context to be consumed and reflected upon. For this exhibition, Newton decomposes precedent in order to create a new visual dialect, specific to a demographic dependent on digital form. By taking imagery from our collective history and combining it with digital symbolism, the artist has created his own vision of conceptual expression. Through a variety of mediums, he supersizes and re-contextualizes the things that make-up our modern lives. Everything from e-cigarettes, shopping carts, iPads, and hashtags are all reborn as paintings, sculptures and mixed media objects made from non-traditional materials. By reorganizing the roles of these everyday articles, Luke Newton sparks a subversive yet important conversation about the things we own and how they define us.