Critical Chaos August 16, 2007

CRITICAL CHAOS
Erik Friedman and Ema Harris-Sintamarian

August 10-26, 2007
Reception for the Artists: Thursday, August 16th, 2007 6-9PM

Swarm Gallery presents the two-person exhibition Critical Chaos featuring Erik Friedman + Ema Harris-Sintamarian.

Erik Friedman's work considers our understanding of how we use and manipulate the infinite amount of information at our disposal. Friedman, a 14-year East Oakland resident, recently began surveying information in his neighborhood. The qualities of his surrounding that were appealing 30 years ago are now gone. The area is now the most industrial part of the city, essentially a wasteland inhabited by lower income residents and encroaching white gentrification. Telephone poles where trees once were, abandoned autos everywhere, pillaged buildings, and the occasional visiting carnival; all interacting in relative cohesion, however abstract. Using layered ink and graphite drawings on mylar and other materials, Friedman brings to view the fractured, noisy detritus of a cultural landscape that exists in Oaklands backyard.

Similarly, Ema Harris-Sintamarian's work gravitates toward ideas concerning fragmentation, construction/deconstruction, and analogous structures. She parallels and fuels her ideas from various fields, methodologies, and artists. Of most interest are Passolinis excess of information and the ideograms of Concrete Poetry and its play on motion; Sir Edward Burnett Tylors ideas on primitive humans and Elizabeth Kings sculptures and understanding of animism; Gabriel Orozcos spontaneous and playful photographs and Roland Barthes understanding of text; Heideggers paradigmatic habit of crossing out the word being and Matt Mullicans architectural forms; Derridas Pharmakon and William Kendriges politicized images. After looking at magazines and seeing how dominated they are by advertisements, her work now reevaluates the idea of identity, consumption and the politics of being a socially active human. By using different cultural iconography, and by imposing and superimposing recognizable with more abstracted similes, she creates a matrix of images. Her working process tends to be intuitive and the work is serial. By working in different media and scale, she broadens the arena of possibilities for visual narrative, creating complex diagrams of personal thoughts and scenarios.

Official Website: http://www.swarmstudios.net