Jon Kessler

Opening: Tuesday, 22 January 6-8 pm
Artist talk: Tuesday, 22 January 5-6 pm
Exhibition continues: 23 January – 22 February 2008

Jon Kessler’s recent body of work is fuelled by a Brechtian take on the creation of culture. His ‘taped together’ aesthetic lays bare the nuts and bolts, cameras and carnage used to manipulate our shuttled view of the contemporary moment. Kessler’s artistic sensibility is typified by frenetic kinetic sculptures and mixed media collages that form a hive of humanity fed by mass media and politics. This solo exhibition of recent works is Kessler’s first in the UK.

The art historical foundation of Kessler’s immersive installations can be followed through Marcel Duchamp’s mile of string in the “First Papers of Surrealism” exhibition, Dada, and Schwitters’ Merzbau. However, beyond these academic associations Kessler’s work is firmly stuck in the present as relentless and staggering as CNN on speed.

The sculptural presence in many of Kessler’s latest works belies the assumed emotional fidelity between a subject and its broadcast image. This disharmony is perhaps most evident in his dizzying “The Cheryl Pictures” from 2004. Here a spot lit stripped strawberry blonde doll is fixed to the end of a motorised spit. Balanced at the opposite end of this spit is a surveillance camera streaming to a nearby monitor. The closely cropped live broadcast shows only the doll’s smiling face blinking in what appears to be the bright sunlight. Kessler’s “Gisele and the Cinopticon” (2004) is a huddled electric kaleidoscope of monitors endlessly shattering images of the Brazilian supermodel into an abstracted blur of the body. Also on view in the exhibition will be a version of Kessler’s ongoing work “Shock and Awe”. Deriving its name from the military term used to describe an ‘overwhelmingly decisive [and gratuitous] use of force’ this real-time video collage will transform a local English landscape into a rolling inferno.

Jon Kessler was born in 1957 in Yonkers, New York and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1980. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1996) and National Endowment for the Arts grants (1983, 1985), he also served as the Chair of Columbia University’s prestigious Visual Arts Department. Kessler has exhibited most recently with Arndt & Partner, Berlin; The Drawing Centre, New York; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; and with novelist Paul Auster at Hermes, Tokyo. Numerous institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; and The Saatchi Gallery, London, collect his work. Kessler’s sprawling installation “The Palace at 4 a.m.” (2004) is the subject of a major monograph catalogue published by Charta with essays by Alanna Heiss and Hal Foster.

Reg Vardy Gallery is open: Tuesday 10 am to 8 pm, Wednesday to Friday 10 am to 6 pm and Saturday by appointment. For more information please call 011 44 (0) 191 515 2128, email robert.blackson@sunderland.ac.uk or visit www.regvardygallery.org.