VOLTA NY 2014
March 6–9, 2014
82MERCER
New York, NY 10012
Entrance at 76 Mercer Street
(between Spring and Broome Streets)
Booth 1.23
Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Canadian artist John Player at VOLTA 2014.
There is a spare, minimal quality to John Player's work – a limited palette and often banal or uneventful subject matter. Distance appears on multiple levels. There is visual distance in his images, giving the viewer a sense of magnitude, and at the same time neutralizing them, making them into maquettes, objects of dispassionate contemplation as we view them from some safe vantage point. They illustrate a contradiction of our media-saturated world: the twenty-four hour news cycle instantaneously brings us closer to events, conflicts and tragedies happening around the world – brings them into our homes, but sanitizes them through the screen or the page – makes them seem contained and distant. This is conceptually important, as we are constantly alerted to looming crises that will affect our lives directly, yet simultaneously they become distant, commonplace, even unreal as they pass through multiple channels of mediation.
While undeniably influenced by contemporary painters like Peter Doig, Luc Tuymans and Gerhard Richter, his major inspiration is the internet itself. The internet, which allows for unprecedented levels of intercommunication, and yet is simultaneously alienating and almost authorless in its massive scope and information overload. Player's technique is inspired by the non-technique of the internet - amateur photos and videos, short news clips and the attendant digital artifacting that results from the downsampling and compression necessary to make photos and videos easily available online. The works invite a critical reflection on ethics and societal decision making, but they also offer a more open-ended meditation on our desires and their relationship to the media that make us who we are.
- from a text by Neal Rockwell
John Player was born in Victoria, Canada in 1983. He holds a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University and is currently completing his MFA in Painting and Drawing at the same institution. He lives and works in Montreal.
PFOAC would like to thank the Canada Council for its support to present John Player at Volta NY.
Site web de John Player
- Page d'artiste de John Player sur le site web de la galerie
- John Player à Volta
- Mention par Eloi Desjardins de l'émission "Un show de Mot'arts" sur notre participation à Volta NY 2014