PROMISE PROBLEM

OSMOS presents Promise Problem, a group exhibition of new works by Chris Dorland, Israel Lund and Gerold Miller that examine the contemporary paradox of searching for the “original jpeg”. Promise Problem proposes a new understanding of the ever-changing original, based on recursive modes of production. The conversation will be continued in the rear gallery with an accompanied selection of historical works by Heimo Zobernig.

“We feed the Google search algorithm with a constant give and take between the affirmative (YES), that is to say to be satisfied with the provided answer, or the critical (NO), the decision to continue to the search. Going back to the initial search source might be impossible because the Page Rank algorithm, has altered the initial starting point. Every new link, every new action (opening a website, a link, sharing it) feeds into the old and creates the new. What seems to be repetitive at first becomes an ever-changing apparatus through our own preceding actions. The search for the “original jpeg” is removed by the comprehension of shifting contexts.” Anne Luther

The works in this exhibition construct repetition, motion and originality by employing a system of production, a concept, reference, form or materiality that seems at first to reduce the work to a repetitive result. Yet, every work is informed by the work developed previously and also becomes a new original. 

In the exhibition at OSMOS Address, Gerold Miller suggests an infinite possibility of length, spacing and context with his Monoform series by following a repetitious rule in production, material and form. Israel Lund’s sculptures are scaled with reference to both the artist’s body and the silkscreens he moves around the studio in the making of his large-scale paintings. Chris Dorland's digitally rendered paintings and works on paper consist of sequences of inputs and outputs. Sourcing images from the artist’s personal biography, the language of advertising and the history of post-war painting, a semiotic compression is achieved through the endless grafting of images onto structures.