And/Or Gallery is pleased to present Show #29:
Joel Holmberg.
For
Show #29, Holmberg will present videos, painting, and live abstract films. In the main gallery,
a multi-screen display will use computer software to tune into the radio spectrum, granting the viewer the
voyeuristic, albeit abstracted, power to survey the industrial geometry of digital signals being broadcast live.
Holmberg is drawn to the radio spectrum for its spatial expansiveness and its physical relationship to interconnected devices.
On the one hand, these visualizations reveal the omnipresence of radio that surrounds us, but they also offer a false sense of
omniscience; they're all-seeing, but they're also indecipherable, unspeakable--a kind of psychic data. Complimenting this display
will be a large landscape painting, the source material of which comes from the website for a military defense
contractor, the Harris Corporation, which is one of the largest suppliers of police and military radios in the world. Although
technological advancements have made it possible for far more amateurs to have access to the full radio spectrum, police departments'
shift from analog to digital radio over the past decade has often been at the expense of transparency, with law enforcement activity
being encrypted from the press and the general public. Also included in
Show #29 will be a screening of Holmberg's single-channel
observational videos and found footage from broadcast television, which will be played on custom hardware designed to create an
infinite pomp-and-circumstance aura and to condense a playlist of videos into a singular experience. In these brief impromptu films,
often shot on a handheld camera, Holmberg reduces the storytelling style of documentary filmmakers and citizen reporters by witnessing
inane incidents--like an unwanted desk stickered with old CD and DVD packaging and trashed on the curb--or by documenting network
television's documentation of itself--as in his recording of an on-air proof-of-performance test.
Joel Holmberg (born 1982, Bethesda, MD) is an artist based in Los Angeles. He holds a BFA from Virginia
Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA (2005) and an MFA from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2013).
He has previously exhibited at the New Museum, New York, NY; American Contemporary, New York, NY; Cleopatra's,
Brooklyn, NY; Outpost, Norwich, UK; The Museum of the Moving Image, New York, NY; The 9th Shanghai Biennale,
Shanghai, CN; The Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT; Espace Gantner, Belfort, FR; and Kettles Yard,
Cambridge, UK. From 2006 to 2012, he was a key contributor to the surf club Nasty Nets and was recently
featured at Michael Benevento Gallery in Los Angeles and in the Made in L.A. 2016 biennial at the Hammer Museum.
For questions and all press inquiries,
please contact
Paul Slocum, Owner and Director, at
info@andorgallery.com or (214) 676-5347.