Double Entendres work by Sam Kontny
Opening Reception: November 6th 6:00 - 8:30pm
Show Dates November 6th - November 21st
We’ve been living our lives through digital, illuminated screens (at least part time) for more than a generation now. Long enough for those screens to contain a true cross-section of our inner lives.
Nostalgia, grief, joy, love, lust.
The screen is like the novel: a form that emerges for the needs of a specific time but leaves long tracks in our consciousness, with a relevance that shows no signs of waning. The screen imitates life, life imitates the screen.
Sam Kontny’s work gives the digital screen it’s proper credit. He combines the high art of the deep past with the daily errata of omnipresent social media. In doing so he rightfully compresses the spheres of high and low culture in a way that reveals the creative gambit of human history as a mesh of technology, aspiration, introspection, public appeals, egos and attempts to truly understand what it all means.
Kontny’s printed and painted works on paper show the artist’s hand while invoking digital tools, the palettes of the pixel that many of us have used just as long as any paintbrush. The work challenges our presumptions about proper domains of culture and creativity – putting the human element right in the center of this beautiful mess of art and technology that we, like Laocoön, are entangled in.
