NEW YORK – December 22, 2010 – CHRISTINA RAY is pleased to present Self-Assembling MP, an exhibition of new work by Darlene Charneco. In a series of new mixed media pieces, jewel-toned and resin-coated surfaces enclose dreamlike habitats or ''memory palaces'' where emergent awareness is networked and universally accessible. The exhibition opens with a reception on Thursday, January 13th, 7–9pm, and runs through February 06 at CHRISTINA RAY, located at 30 Grand Street, New York.

Charneco’s work draws on sources including network theory, microbiology, video games, virtual worlds, evolutionary theory and childhood toys. Her participation in online communities Facebook, Flickr and SecondLife inspire her deeply layered landscapes of information. Casting organic patterns of nails, toy parts, glitter, flocking, wood and enamel into clear resin, Charneco’s mixed-media pieces are the sci-fi equivalent of a fly in amber. The results yield deep and intensely colored miniature worlds that literally reflect the plasticity of contemporary culture and cause us to think deeply about spatial memory.

Trends linking friends, memories and individual histories that have sparked much current interest and debate, particularly in relation to privacy, are a central concern of Charneco. In fact, the recently reported leak of a new Facebook feature called Memories points directly at the emergence of collective memory that Charneco has followed for the past decade. Her passion for studying the mind’s deep affinity for three-dimensional expressions of personal information is reflected in her work depicting the gradual rearranging of mass amounts of uploaded data into navigable environments.

Self-assembly – a term used to describe a disordered system of pre-existing components forming a replicable pattern – manifests in Charneco’s work as crystal-like nodes representing social networks that generate new forms of collective experience. We can witness these effects in our own world today as GoogleEarth expands across the map, embedding the territory in real-time with news data, user photos and Wikipedia entries. Charneco’s detection of this growth anticipates our evolution toward a universal memory populating a computer-generated virtual space.

About the artist: Darlene Charneco's resin-layered mappings explore social networks and the gradual reorganization of information on the web into shareable and intuitively navigable 3D spaces. She is inspired by the blurring boundaries between dream and waking activities, natural and urban environments, the implications of our rapidly increasing interconnectivity and the evolution of an accessible collective memory. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US at venues including the Katonah Museum, the Hunterdon Museum, The Islip Art Museum and Parrish Art Museum. Her work is featured in the recent book  'The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography' by Katherine Harmon 2009. Charneco lives and works on the east end of Long Island.

CHRISTINA RAY is an innovative gallery and creative catalyst in New York whose mission, grounded by the concept of psychogeography, is to discover and present the most important contemporary artwork exploring the relationship between people and places. For more information, visit www.christinaray.com.

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 13, 7–9pm
Hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm
Exhibition Dates: January 13–February 06, 2011
Location: 30 Grand Street, Ground Floor
Directions: A/C/E to Canal Street or 1 to Canal Street; gallery is located between Thompson Street and 6th Avenue

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