de_luminary.bsp
de_luminary.bsp
January 30th -
February 26th, 2015
Joshua Howell presents de_luminary.bsp, a solo exhibition created while in residence at The Luminary, which aims to map out a new and growing form of space - a post-representational, dematerialized, cultural space - utilizing the remapped gallery as a beginning point.
Opening Reception:
January 30th from 7 - 10pm
TL;DR - The aim of this show is to map out a new and growing form of space, post-representational, dematerialised, cultural space.
Ray Liotta is angry again. You can see it from the veins in his head bursting out.
Sometimes, when Ray is angry he looks like he might be in the middle of shitting inside his boxer briefs.
He’s about a hairs breadth from a rage quit.
Ray’s been under a lot of pressure lately. Muppets Most Wanted was taxing and since Dear Dracula went straight to video the Mrs has been on his case. We’ve all been there, under the cosh. Like that guy in Not Another Teenage Movie who is feeling the heat the whole movie because he’s trying to start a slow clap at the right time and Melissa Joan Hart, his slow clap instructor gives him that advice at the party. I guess Melissa for that matter, post-Sabrina, was feeling it too.
Anyway, he’s calmed down now, his agent came and stroked his back for a while. Long acrylic (clear mind) fingernails on the broad of his silkened back, he did that head twitch freak out thing, shudders down the back. Wait, did Ray just have 1/8th of an orgasm?
We’ve left the artificially lit barroom set, traversed it’s shadow and ‘busted’ out the fire exit into the outdoors, a sunlit parking lot in the studio complex. Ray cut through a head height cloud of pot smoke that surrounded the door, the set builders to blame. From where we’re stood, as he passed though the fog, Ray’s hair turned from black (dyed of course) to grey from Ray Liotta at the Hollywood film festival 2002 to Ray Liotta at the Deauville American film festival 2014, but this Ray is neither, this Ray is Ray Liotta leaving some set, some time, somewhere.
This Ray, he’s a Karate Ray.
A non-geographic Ray Liotta.
A cultural Ray made up of thousands of Ray Lioxels, 3D cultural building blocks established in the collective imagination.
This global Ray Liotta is available at our convenience, anywhere, anytime, telepresent.
In our post-representational world, full of dislocated and re-contextualised images how can we interpret the notions of space, geography and cultural exchange? The speed of our global networks has accelerated development of our collected culture, shared by audiences previously unavailable due to distance.
de_luminary.bsp is a survey of space, both physical and cultural, of the map and of the territory.
In de_luminary.bsp, space is represented in multiple forms. The Luminary is rendered as a level in Counterstrike, architectural plans of the building are overlaid with fictional addresses and stamped with commemorative celebrity stamps, fictional places jostle for position with real ones, there’s a found bootleg copy of Not Another Teen Movie and I’m sure Ray’s here too.
In Mind = Blown, 2014 an extract from Paul Virilio’s text The Information Bomb subtitles a virtual terrorist attack on the gallery. Delineating the ideas behind what Paul likes to call the ‘end of space’ the extract implies that due to the speed of information sharing and telecommunications we are moving towards a post-geographic world.
In Spatial Oddity (David Bowie), 2014 and Night Moves (Bob Seger), 2014 layering becomes more intense. Silent karaoke subtitles roll over gameplay from the gallery level. Although obvious visual puns, an audience is invited not to sing along but to potentially occupy the same cultural space as the songs, wallow in their deep pools of reference as solid informational readymades.
Note: Counter-Strike is a first-person shooter video game played in mom’s basements, bedrooms and cyber cafes throughout the early 2000s up to the modern day.
The Luminary's exhibitions are supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Regional Arts Commission and the Missouri Arts Council.