Jonathan Ferrara Gallery is proud to announce that the New Orleans Museum of Art will present Deja Vu All Over Again new photographs, video, sculpture and silkscreen works by Generic Art Solutions (G.A.S.), the artist team of Tony Campbell and Matt Vis in their first solo museum exhibition. The exhibition at NOMA opens on Wednesday October 20th in the second floor Frederick R. Weisman Galleries and runs through February 13, 2011.
Generic Art Solutions (G.A.S.)
G.A.S. is the New Orleans-based collaboration of Tony Campbell and Matt Vis. The duo have been blending history and humor with critique for the past 10 years. London-born Campbell and Virginia-born Vis have exhibited in New York, London and New Orleans.
"Generic Art Solutions thoughtfully uses the language of art history to comment on present day concerns," says Miranda Lash, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. "They update the formal strategies of Western masters such as Manet, Rubens and Caravaggio into themes as diverse as illegal immigration, capital punishment and man-made disasters. Their goal is not to precisely replicate historical paintings. Rather they employ déjà vu as a critical tool, stimulating a dialogue between past and present."
Déjà Vu All Over Again: Generic Art Solutions references the frustration in Louisiana that disasters seem to repeat themselves.
Of the exhibition, G.A.S. says:
We feel that we are living in history-making times. In creating our various works, we plunder art history in order to shed light on today. In doing this, we have found that human nature hasn't really changed throughout the ages. Casting ourselves in every role, we explore through art the issues of identity and the recurring themes of humanity.
IMAGE
Generic Art Solutions (G.A.S.)
The Raft
Photograph on Billboard paper
10.5 ft by 16.5 ft
This G.A.S. adaptation of Theodore Gericault's Raft of the Medusa (originally painted 1818-19), which depicts lives needlessly lost at sea under the restored French monarchy, is fused with the modern day tragedy of the eleven men who died during the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion on April 20, 2010. Parallel stories of anguish, waste and mismanagement are blended into a timeless panorama on human fallibility.
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