TAUBA AUERBACH: “THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE”
08.05.-08.06.2008 / PREVIEW: THURSDAY 08.05.2008 / 19.00-21.00
STANDARD (OSLO) is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with the American artist Tauba Auerbach. “The Uncertainty Principle” sees the artist extend her investigation of language and mathematics to a discussion of probabilities and polarities. At the centre of her analysis is the question: how are determinism and probability different?
In Tauba Auerbach’s works there is a recurring interest in the space between the sensical and non-sensical – in how meaning is translated through the help of fragile and frequently failing systems of signs and symbols. Language and logic both appear as porous (and potentially playful) in her works on paper, which have investigated such various elements of communication as semaphore, Morse, and binary programming language. In “The Uncertainty Principle”, Auerbach combines a double channel video projection with seven new drawings and five new photographs to address the constant diminishing presence of randomness – as a result of technology’s reductions and / or simulations of ‘the random’.
Among these works are three drawings belonging to Auerbach’s “50/50” series. Taking their starting point from binary programming language they confront the problem of digital definition: the impossibility of true ambiguity when only possibly represented through unambiguous parts. The artist has transformed the binary programming language of 1’s and 0’s into a system of modularized black and white halves. Employing this scheme, the works take a curiously complicated path to the most average, ambiguous grey. The result is anything but the colour, but thus also – by remaining loyal to its digital definition of 50% white and 50% black – offers a comment on how technology shapes our logical systems
Adding to Auerbach’s works on paper is a series of photographs: “Static 1-5”. Concentrating on a soon extinct phenomenon – TV static – these large-scale framed photographic presents tableaux where information is potentially present but interfered. The result is a ‘white noise’ where a random dot pattern is superimposed on the picture. Employing this formal principle a point of departure, Auerbach has produced a suite of airbrush drawings entitled “CMY 1-4”. The three primary colours of printing have been employed to produce non-compositions willingly aiming at randomness. They, nevertheless, seem to arrange themselves in accordance to rhythms and patterns. Evoking the flat power spectral density of the TV static they present a situation of symmetric possibilities: of information unfolding itself or folding in.
Tauba Auerbach (b. 1981) lives and works in San Francisco and New York. She graduated from Stanford University, California, and has since had numerous solo exhibitions including “Yes and Not Yes” at Deitch Projects, New York, and “The Answer/Wasn’t Here”, Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco. Her works have also been included in group exhibitions such as “Words Fail Me” at Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, “Beneath the Underdog” at Gagosian Gallery, New York, and “Panic Room” at the Deste Art Foundation, Athens. She is currently showing in “Passengers” at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, where she will also have a solo exhibition in September.