Past Exhibition
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SOME RE-ASSEMBLY REQUIRED | Jeff Eisenberg October 30 - December 5, 2010 Artist Talk | Thursday November 18, 6PM SOME RE-ASSEMBLY REQUIRED, East Bay Express 1 DEC 2010
Swarm Gallery is thrilled to present the works of Jeff Eisenberg, for his first solo exhibition, Some Re-Assembly Required. Jeff will present new drawings, video and installation. Jeff Eisenberg's work explores a number of concerns: Issues of abstraction and form; space shaping and architecture; territorializing and the built environment; utopian strategies and speculative futures. He is interested in how these topics can intersect and become expressed through the engineering of our lived spaces, especially as architecture. He is also intrigued by our quest to create the "perfect" space, a space that adheres to one idea or another about what is the right way to inhabit a space, and how ideals such as these can code the shaping of spaces. Often, these ideals and codes co-mingle with the codes and ideals of others as a space takes shape and evolves over time, leading to contradictions and giving rise to a space that generates a complex and convoluted relationship with its intended users. Within his own work he often adopts creation strategies that mimic this co-mingling process, exploring his interests with images that embody any number of his thoughts simultaneously. Recently Jeff has begun to expand his studio practice to include other ways of approaching these interests, adopting new media forms and methods for making work. Inspired by the recent economic collapse, and while on residency last May at Goldwell Residency in Nevada, he began to think about how, as Americans, our relationship to our homes have changed. He says: "We seem to have dual and competing ideas about it: On the one hand viewing a home as a sign of stability and security, while on the other viewing our homes as disposable commodities, something to trade up from. All of this seems to play into a larger set of contradicting cultural narratives: that of a desire for setting down roots, and our desire to remain mobile - always on the make for a brighter, better future." Looking around the landscape of Nevada, he saw these contradictions played out all around him: Foreclosures in Las Vegas, abandoned gold mining towns, and unincorporated villages out in the desert. Even the wild burros seemed to inhabit these contradictions. The idea that kept popping up in his mind was that things in America are starting to go a little feral.
Following this residency Jeff moved to Indiana to work a one-year position at Wabash College. While there he began to collaborate with artist Kristen Wilkins, another visiting art professor, who shared similar thoughts about recent events, as well as their own participation in this emerging, feral reality. Calling the collaborative team M0bile Pr4actice, the centerpiece of their efforts is a single player video game titled "Stake your Claim". The game exploits several traditions in video games in order to address our interests: such as the player's greed for high scores, linear progression through levels that to lead to greater risk and greater reward, and the tradition of fantasy and story telling. In addition to the game, M0bile Pr4ctice produced other, related works and Jeff continues to expand on these ideas through his own work. His most recent drawings take the work of squatter collectives that he first saw on trips to Detroit and the former East Berlin as inspiration. While he admires the spirit of reuse and renewal that these communities practice, his own work still explores both the lighter and darker sides of all possibilities. Jeff's hope is that the new drawings create a response in the viewer that itself is contradictory - not knowing if the drawings represent a renewal of some kind or simply a new way to exploit another situation. BIO Jeff Eisenberg received his M.F.A. in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005 and a certificate in sculpture from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1998. He has had numerous solo shows, most recently at Christopher West Presents, IN, and Zaum Projects, in Lisbon, Portugal. His work has been shown in exhibitions throughout the United States and in Germany. Jeff is currently living in San Francisco, CA. PREVIEW WORKS
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