April 5 - May 3 2012

Luca Antonucci | Tyrone Davies | Jenny Odell | Cal Volner-Dison

The inaugural exhibition at Sherwood Gallery, Nothing is True. Nothing is Untrue, presents a selection of photography, video, installation and printmaking exploring the dichotomies and intersections of transparent order and dystopic control. The space is transformed into a surveillant world consisting of galaxies, media broadcasting systems, advertisement billboards, nuclear cooling towers, highways, and salt ponds.

Upon entry, the viewer will be confronted with a large mirrored flag by Cal Volner-Dison. The self-reflexive flag is a national marker for Nothing is True. Nothing is Untrue. Volner-Dison also uses wall text as a strategic device to examine the interstice between visual and verbal language as semiotic systems.

Tyrone Davies brings Ballard’s statement “sooner or later, everything turns into television,” to life by an abundance of flashing screens playing footage of gun-toting cowboys, mid-western parades, how-to-paint episodes, smashed television sets, Japanese animations, and more. The monitors activate space with an overload of moving images and crashing sonic waves, problematizing our media literacy and challenging the prescribed application of mass communication.

Luca Antonucci employs the notion of deconstructing information and potential 'fictionality' of documents through two sets of work. The Brightest Stars Fade Away, where continuously printed galaxies cause the formal elements of composition to fade as each print is formed. Antonucci's Space, Time, and Architecture is revised by opaque black mark-making and painted sheer white layers, leaving a mere ten percent of the book in it's original state. The remaining has been crossed out, mystified and fogged thus "forming a more condensed history of space". Pages from the book are then reproduced on translucent material, creating a binary of censored and transparent policy.

Jenny Odell forms bewitching collages by eliminating and rebuilding paths as she virtually wanders the Apollonian landscape of Google Earth. The works elicit both dread and hope as Odell takes the visual mechanics of controlled navigation, and surveillance-- cuts it, pastes it, and composes an alluring grid of imagery.