April 22–May 23, 2010
CHRISTINA RAY is pleased to present Mark Price’s second New York solo exhibition, Designer End Game Strategies. The exhibition includes a series of new works on panel in which the human, the machine and the global city have merged into a broken landscape of crisis. The exhibition opens with a reception on April 22nd, 7–9pm, and runs through May 23rd.
Designer End Game Strategies merges fantasy with reality in the depiction of a contemporary state of emergency induced and performed by an irrational and panicked society. Bodies are sacrificed into abstract remains under the cultural mismanagement of capital and technology. Fluids are exchanged between populations – gold for blood, blood for oil – while actual events are lost and forgotten. The populace becomes generalized and ambiguous as it slips between screens and ruptures at every point. Temporary solutions to problems that cannot be solved have been exhausted as end game strategies become fragile and few. The body now functions as a broken landscape, un-navigable and stuck, devoid of options for resolution.
As Guy Debord noted in his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, “With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, un-checkable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.” Price grasps this sense of instability as he rips the foundation from his compositions, leaving a spatial casualty of jagged forms in toxic, hyper-saturated hues. In depicting the confused survival efforts of a technology-driven human population, Price’s highly stylized technique hints at the futuristic graphic novel. Yet the narrative of permanent, self-induced catastrophe is flattened – shattered at each turn into a crisp, pop-colored space punctuated with disaster.
Mark Price lives and works in Philadelphia. His work was recently selected by curator Aaron Betsky for inclusion in the internationally recognized Confines exhibition at the Institut Valencia d’Art Modern. Group exhibitions include Peer Pressure at The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and Locally Localized Gravity at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Price was a member of the Philadelphia-based artist collective Space 1026 from 2004 – 2009.
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