This exhibition takes its conceptual inspiration from the Internet, which puts an amazing array of visual and textual information at our disposal. We point and click on specific highlighted links and picture boxes on our computers to bring up the desired information. The differently designed web pages are interspersed with frames of advertising - each quite different in its graphic design, color, size and intensity. And yet all of this information is represented to us within the framework of our two-dimensional monitors.
Our eyes and minds play an active role in selecting links to further our researches into the commercial network, academia, news, gossip, titillation, financial strategies, or sheer data. The Internet plays the role of the great disseminator of information in a most accessible and democratic fashion. All this information is linked in hyper-space, a conceptual realm made perceivable and understandable by our roles as players.
Just as the Internet disseminates ideas today, artists have traditionally used the print medium for over 300 years to reinterpret and diffuse an aesthetic idea to a greater audience. More recently in this century, with the advent of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades,artists have also created multiples--- three-dimensional objects often produced in fairly large or unlimited editions. One of the goals of HYPERsalon is to display the incredible diversity of visual imagery and technical approaches that artists have developed in their prints and multiples.
The theatrical salon-style installation forces you, the viewer, to make visual decisions about what to focus on first and where your eye will travel (or link to) next. The exhibition is purposefully eclectic and playful, and it embraces a broad range of work that includes, among others, traditional representational mezzotints, abstract monotypes, digital media-based work, quirky or politically-charged multiples, and unabashedly commercial objects.
This particular exhibition experience denies the visitor's expectations of the now traditional, post 60s, white box cube---one that is minimally installed and rhythmically paced. Given the tidal wave of information we are deluged with on a daily bases, a frenetic and dense salon-style presentation is more appropriate to approximate thematically this new daunting and exciting way of perceiving our world.
Andrea Pollan