LATE STAGE @ Galerie Manqué

 Marcus David
June 2019

Laurie Yuile, Inject with Life, video, image courtesy of Galerie Manqué

With glimpses of 3D-rendered animations, TED talk visuals and feel-good corporate messaging, LATE STAGE, presents a group of artists that take the slick, hi tech style used to convey information by our authoritative overlords and turn it on it’s head. The results are both unsettlingly real and confusing. The forms of control and manipulation, employed by even something as benign seeming as a TED talk, can create paranoia among those of us that seek to question the system in which we exist. In this group exhibition, Bob Bicknell-Knight, George Metesky, Erin Mitchell, Pablo Stahl and Laurie Yuile adopt these various forms of corporate culture and their aim to subvert.

Erin Mitchell’s video performance, The Furture of Virtual Nature, appears to us in the form of a fast talking authoritative TED talk, where the claims made and the words spoken are not backed up with facts. The truth is in the legitimacy of the form itself, leaving one to ponder the simple equation: if it looks legit then it must be true. Mitchell prods us to question the power of association and the effect a simple logo can have on the brain.

Bob Bicknell-Knight’s HD video, State of Affairs, is a 24 minute compilation of digitally rendered life and death. The footage comes from the YouTube channel News Direct, in which daily news stories are transformed into 3-D animations. The non-linear presentation illustrates the current and future form of technological interface, from facial recognition software to drone surveillance.

Bob Bicknell-Knight, State of Affairs, HD video, image courtesy of Galerie Manqué

George Metesky’s painting is an aerial view of a penitentiary complex, calling to mind the look of CAD renderings. The effect of the colors and composition is both soothing and benign until one comes to realize the real purpose of the structures. The horror of for-profit incarceration is blunted by this mode of presentation, allowing those in the boardroom the distance necessary to contemplate their schemes without moral conflict.

Pablo Stahl’s video and posters entitled Nous are sampled from cooperate feel-good messaging combined with what appears to be stock photography. In this work Stahl presents Nous, an imaginary company touting a message that encourages enthusiasm and positivity through its corporate identity and expressed by well dressed young professional men frolicking on the beach. With the promise of company support, Stall’s use of motivational sloganeering creates the opposite effect and leaves one instead with an ominous feeling of oppression and insincerity.

Laurie Yuile’s video, Inject with Life, uses the image of a young woman performing yoga moves super imposed over the backdrop of a shopping mall full of activity. This juxtaposition of consumerism and the spiritual has the dark effect of creating yet another insincere promise of what business has to offer, and exposing the real goal: feel good while you buy, buy, buy.

Taken together the works in LATE STAGE expresses the fear attached to ideas of where we are headed as a society and how easily we are manipulated. One is left to wonder what does freedom really mean in a society so thoroughly under control.

Erin Mitchell,  The Future of Virtual Nature, video performance, image courtesy of Galerie Manqué

LATE STAGE
Galerie Manqué
56 Bogart Street, Bushwick