BSOD

Azusa Pacific University Department of Art & Design is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Los Angeles artist John Bauer, “BSOD.”  The exhibition is on view in Duke Gallery November 3 – 20, 2015 with a reception for the artist, guests, and the public on Tuesday, November 3 from 6pm to 8pm. 

The title of the exhibition, BSOD, stands for Blue Screen of Death, the error screen displayed in Windows as a result of a system crash.  The title also refers to a blue screen, which in film and video, denotes a background in front of which moving subjects are filmed.  Technology, film, the color blue and death are the conceptual underpinnings of Bauer’s exhibition.  

Bauer’s work destabilizes our understanding of abstract painting by questioning its authorship, authenticity and process. His studio practice involves stenciling, spraying, rolling, brushing, and screen printing. He photographs and scans studies of gestural marks, then layers and builds upon these images both digitally and directly on the canvas. Additionally, the photographic documentation of completed paintings become the catalyst for new works, which are digitally manipulated, and screen printed on the canvas. Gestural “actors” and their “screened doubles”, dance across the literal blue field or screen of the painting. These layered actors, cancel, delete, shift, mirror, and overwrite themselves. By employing a series of mediated techniques, Bauer’s practice debunks, or kills, the historically existential meaning of mark making by creating a collision or crash between gesture, material and technological processes.