Subject To Be : Maria Cruz, Lisa Andrew, Sarah Goffman, Elizabeth Newman, Stefan Sehler, Gerardo Tan

 
SUBJECT TO BE at the Department of Avant-Garde Clichés gallery from July 26 to August 23, 2012, presents a group show of artists from Australia, Germany, and the Philippines exploring the connection between appearance and substance, permanence and chance, and the complex aesthetic links that form through friendship. 
Maria Cruz presents a fabulous quartet of archival prints based on paint daubs over studio rags, the chromatic fugues of which rival actual paintings that give the illusion of impressionist effulgence.  Shimmering in their perfect harmony, the prints recall a famed pop group from the sixties that left us with lasting impressions touching on love, loss, freedom, and the joy of life.  Elizabeth Newman’s images are culled from art magazine pages, toggling between concerns over the aesthetic and the commercial, remade into newer contexts of form and its production, content and marketability.  The work therefore speaks of the globalized transactions of information and the multiple applications it could hold, but with a concerned mind for authentic experiences surviving within a culture of mass commodification. Gerry Tan plays with art’s familiar comfort only to twist it anew towards challenging alignments that fire the imagination.  Finding relational forms existing in random media images, Tan remixes distant expressions into a unified structure of complex meaning.  Lisa Andrew fools the eye with various textures akin to the granular graze of life, where her work displaces our fixed expectations of the real.  While Stefan Sehler approaches solid appearances like masks to be removed with his glass illusion turning into a smart commentary about the representation of images. Sarah Goffman presents a large digital print of a drawing of Tatami mat on cardboard, mixing fragility with substance in a medium that seeks the subject to be defined. / Text by Arvin Flores