Use Your Indoor Voice
7 March - 2 April 2008
One in the Other is pleased to present New York artist Aaron Wexler in his first UK solo exhibition. Wexler graduated from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 before moving to New York where he now lives and works. He has had exhibitions in the US at Josee Bienvenu, Lehmann Maupin, Oliver Kamm, PS122 and The National Academy Museum. Wexler first showed in the UK in the group exhibition ‘Twilight Musing’ at One in the Other in 2007 featuring Ed Ruscha, Fiona Rae, Shirley Kaneda, Clunie Reid and John Wilkins.
Aaron Wexler’s inter-connecting surfaces operate within a complex matrix of acrylic and paper collage on panel and paper. The mat acrylic surfaces of his works are gently incised and peeled away to reveal intertwining imagery of figuration and abstraction. Wound together, the pictures float in and out of focus and illusory space whilst simultaneously denoting the flatness of their plane and materiality. All at once his work synthesizes a physical and pictorial space. Wexler often uses the sense of a dreamscape as a way of annexing the language of abstraction and employs subtle opposites (guns and flowers, plant life and geometry) as a way of paraphrasing the language of the subconscious.
Whilst visually dextrous, Wexler’s art is also inescapably material and object-like. The method of construction is precise, structured and disciplined. The collage technique is nuanced and layered, vaguely elusive and strangely reductive. Layers are built up but are done so in order to subtract from the overall image and create voids in the landscape of the imagery. Other areas use graphic injections of colour to define positive and negative outlined shapes, pushing elements of figuration and abstraction forwards and backwards. Whilst, in a sense, adopting a traditional ‘cut and paste’ approach to collage, Wexler’s work also carries a seamlessness equally redolent of digitised media.
Aaron Wexler’s work will feature in the forthcoming Saatchi Gallery exhibition and book Abstract America.
The Many Wings of the Arts and Sciences 2007
Acrylic and paper on panel
112 x 152cm
It Takes Two 2008
Acrylic and paper on panel
122 x 102cm
Prisoner of Imagination 2007
Acrylic and paper on panel
122 x 183cm