Golden Champagne
September 21 - October 12, 2013
Golden Champagne is a touring exhibition by New York based artists R. Lyon and Jessie Stead, working as JS/RL. Golden Champagne is both performative documentation and poetic excess culled from the JS/RL Periodicals, a multi-volume series of books
documenting years of hyperactive text messaging between the collaborators.
The Periodicals shimmer between everyday life and an orgy of unpredictable fictions. The text's layers of insular code, innuendo,
primitive languages, and purposeful misinterpretation germinate a plastic fantasy world of parasitic clones, fantasy publishing houses,
butt modeling agencies, ex-Mormon alter-egos, house-cat graphic designers, and the occasional apocalypse.
In the exhibition, the cosmos described in the JS/RL Periodicals are submitted to further hermeneutic interpretation, generating
performances, works of cinema, insular books of criticism and other elaborations in an ongoing recursive production cycle.
The JS/RL Periodicals also function as a catalog for single edition large format transparencies, each a unique composite of text, image
and text-as-image, projected from spreads located in the original volumes. Additional quotations are mined from the book's index of
countless texts and re-scripted into the contemporary ether as websites. The registered domains and their corresponding certificates of
ownership are presented as oversized "slides", hand mounted on plate glass amidst a sandwich of glittery jetsam, dusty ephemera, and
samples of the artist's DNA.
The JS/RL Periodicals are available to preview or purchase from Phiadon.com
Please enjoy the trailer for the exhibition here:
Golden Champagne debuts at What Pipeline gallery in Detroit on September 21, 2013, and travels to Malraux's Place Gallery in New York in November.
Jessie Stead (NY) produces and distributes work in overlapping patterns of cinema, installation, audio and other forms of cross- disciplined art. Posing as a film director in an on-going IRL performance piece, Stead's mutating single channel motion-pictures have been featured internationally, recent presentations include the Greater New York Cinema exhibition at MoMA PS1, the London Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Performances and events orchestrated by Stead and key collaborators including her art-band HARIBO have been presented at mixed venues including Performa 11, Akershus Kunstsenter, Real Fine Arts, nightclubs and many other places. A solo installation by Stead and her "mood lighting group" AMBIENTS debuted at Soloway Gallery in 2012.
http://jessiestead.com
R. Lyon creates machines to collapse the future and the present, conjures objects of desire from alias and error, traces maps to the locations of power, and materializes the cybernetic intelligences that mediate our world. Lyon is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program, a Javits scholar, artist and sometimes curator- who lectures, performs and exhibits under a variety of pseudonyms. His work has been featured internationally (Kunstcenter Hasselt, Transmediale Berlin) and throughout galleries in the United States. His most recent work featured a collaboration with Fia Backstrom and Julieta Aranda at the Goethe Center Library in New York.
http://irlyon.com
Press release
