RYAN HUMPHREY

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DCKT Contemporary is pleased to present Early American, RYAN HUMPHREY’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. HUMPHREY explores duality through an altered, customized version of an 18th century American interior. The installation hijacks the format of a formal and affluent interior, infusing it with cast-offs and objects more likely found in a rural garage than an antique shop.  Class and taste are called into question and the hierarchy of materials associated with social stratification is discarded.

Take a period room from a museum, filter it through the worlds of car culture, metal and hip hop music and the X Games and you end up with this: hand-painted faux wood paneling, console tables, wing back chairs, chandeliers, rugs, girandole mirrors and candlesticks all made from bottle caps, rubber coatings, broom handles, car rims, pop rivets, license plates and sheet metal.

Tread is a hand-painted and lettered found sign from a Brooklyn “flat fix” storefront transformed into a contemporary “DON’T TREAD ON ME” echo of a flag flown during the American Revolution. A series of bird houses incorporate “firebirds” from late 1970s Pontiac Trans Am muscle cars, symbolic of the mythical phoenix resurrecting itself. Good Gay, a banner with the logo from heavy metal band Judas Priest fused with a gay pride rainbow flag, creates a new symbol which highly alters the traditional meanings of the individual parts.

HUMPHREY lives and works in New York City. He will have a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Galapagos (Brooklyn, NY) September 15 through November 7, 2010. Previous solo exhibitions include The Galleries at Moore (Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia) and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City). Group exhibitions include Queens International 4, Queens Museum of Art (NY) and the traveling group exhibition Will Boys be Boys?: Questioning Adolescent Masculinity in Contemporary Art, curated by Shamim M. Momin. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art, received his MFA from Hunter College in New York and his BFA from Ohio University.

DCKT Contemporary

FAILE & BÄST //

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FAILE & BÄST
DELUXX FLUXX ARCADE

What do you get when Brooklyn-based duo Faile and collaborator Bast take over a disused store front on the Lower East Side? Deluxx Fluxx, a functional video arcade that will be open to the public from April 30th to May 27th.

Originally conceived as a one-off project in London, Deluxx Fluxx allowed Faile and Bast to indulge nostalgia for the classic video arcade while exploring the tactile possibilities of the wooden cabinet as sculptural medium. In its New York incarnation, the retrofitted machines run new games by Adapted Studio based on Faile and Bast’s omnivorous visual language, with sounds produced by Seth Jabour of the noted band Les Savy Fav.

Deluxx Fluxx aims to make art less sterile, more fun, and accessible to a broad audience. This sensibility harkens back to the golden age of arcade games; a time when the Lower East Side itself was still a redoubt for punk rock and graffiti culture. These foundational roots of the neighborhood are apparent in the show’s DIY and street art production values. Faile and Bast rebuke the contemporary art world’s fixation on ideas of relational aesthetics and democratization, and give their audience a chance to genuinely engage the work without the looming formality of the traditional gallery. Deluxx Fluxx is entirely interactive, and invites viewers to play a round of psychedelic foosball and take part in the art itself. It is the artists’ intention that viewers will forget they are looking at art, and be captivated by the carnivalesque. The video arcade may be a lost form, but in Faile and Bast’s re-imagining, it gets a temporary and much needed revival.

Deluxx Fluxx

Perry Rubenstein Gallery