Opening Saturday October 26th

On View at the Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen Street through November 2nd

On View at the Recession Art Gallery, 47 Bergen Street though November 24th

In Pop Authentic, Recession Art’s 9th group show at the Invisible Dog Art Center, we prompted artists with questions about relevance, symbolism, and the identity of the 21st century pop artist. The result was a group of 12 artists who are examining their identity as artists in a world of appropriation, discussing whether this type of art making can or should create authentic experiences, and investigating how artists come to terms with profiting from the pop aesthetic.

We are pleased to announce the artists of Pop Authentic:

Theatre Reverb: Kristin Arnesen and Radoslaw Konopka | In 2006, Kristin Arnesen and Radoslaw Konopka founded Theatre Reverb in order to create original hybrid productions in the form of performances, live art, and video works. They treat commercial culture and mass media as a unifying network of resonant symbols that invoke a shared national mythology and cultural imagination. Arnesen and Konopka insert items of found culture into hyper-real associative dreamscapes. This allows re-appropriated materials to be consumed differently, providing a platform to explore the agenda of the “originals” and the mechanism by which culture is produced and consumed.

Brian Cavanaugh | Brooklyn-based artist Brian Cavanaugh is an artist whose digital art practice explores data, technology, and privacy. He received his BFA in Art and Digital Media from Albright College in 2008 and his MFA in New Forms from Pratt Institute in 2010. His artistic practice is focused on using technology to collect and analyze data. In the work on view for Pop Authentic, Cavanaugh utilizes hashtags – keywords that connect visual information, ideas, and people through a common linguistic marker. These works find the average color within public Instagram photos that use the same keyword. Cavanaugh writes, “by distilling this data as a source for new work, I believe that art from popular digital culture can exist outside the traditional norms of appropriation.”

Charlotte Emerson Fassler | Originally from Los Angeles, California, Charlotte Fassler graduated with a BA in Art History from Barnard College in 2013 with a concentration in Visual Arts. She currently lives and works in New York. Growing up at the height of the digital information age, Fassler feels a lingering nostalgia for pop culture of the past –  nostalgia for an era without the omnipresence of technology. Her work investigates the role of irony in the recontexualization of mass-produced images. Fassler writes: “I err away from the comfort of the familiar and ironically reframe recognizable images to evoke a sense of displacement utilizing dark, perverse humor. In addition to the product, my process itself is rooted in irony. I find a sense of catharsis in working in mediums that veer away from the digital and explicitly show the careful mark of my hand.”

Tate Foley | Born in Millerton, Pennsylvania, Tate Foley currently lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, where he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art in the Department of Art, Design, and Visual Culture at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned his BA in Studio Art from Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania in 2007 and his MFA in Printmaking from Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia in 2010. Foley’s paintcuts are created through a process of layering acrylic paint and carving through it with woodcut tools to reveal the colors undermeath. The text that is revealed represent and magnify the big ideas and aspirations of popular culture.

Chris Gideon | Living and working outside of Detroit, Michigan, Christopher Gideon is an emerging artist and designer with an extensive background in architecture. He earned his BS and MAR at Lawrence Technical University in 2003 and 2005, respectively. Gideon creates collages using baseball cards from his childhood collection. He states that, although as a child these cards signified organization and monetary value, they are now completely worthless except as symbols of nostalgia. Gideon writes: “the main objective of my collage work is to reinstate a sense of importance back into that which has lost its significance and value over time. The irony in the work comes from not only the new objects that are created, but also how they are created: through the destruction and reconstruction of what was once so precious to me.”

Matthew Scott Gualco | Brooklyn-based artist Matthew Scott Gualco earned his BFA in Painting from Kansas City Art Institute in 2008 and his MFA in New Genre from San Francisco Art Institute in 2012. Gualco writes: “My work forms an allusive hybrid between drawing and literature by interjecting the subject matter with literature and symbols.  There is rawness in the manner that is within the understanding of the viewer. Based on my experiences and everyday life, I portray society with all of its imperfections that we all enjoy.”

Khanh H. Le with Thanh T. La | Born in My Tho, Vietnam during a time of conflict, Khanh H. Le and his finance Thanh T. La currently live and work in Washington, DC.  Le graduated with an MFA from Syracuse University in 2008. Le explores and questions the notion of identities through the lenses of culture and memories, probing his personal and familial histories in an attempt to carve out a cultural identity for himself. Through the process of collage, Le layers fragmented photo images collected from family photo albums, digital photographs, and fashion and home decor magazines to create photogravure etchings that embody a new historical narrative reflective of the tension within his own identity.

Katie Mackowick | Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Katie Mackowick currently lives and works in Queens. Primarily working through collage, Mackowick embraces the appropriation of imagery. By deconstructing vintage images of people, places, and symbols of our collective unconscious and juxtaposing them in a new way, her work serves to both repurpose and completely recontextualize the final products in a way that reflects society’s obsessions with the manic, instantly gratifying, and visually consumptive culture of the 21st century.

Joshua Pelletier | Originally from Maine, upstate New York-based artist Joshua Pelletier received his BA from Bard College in 2000, and his MFA degree from UC Davis in 2010. He writes that his pieces in Pop Authentic are “essentially an appropriation mash-up. They are a forced collaboration between two artists: self-proclaimed “Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkaid and Kensuke Tanabe, the game designer responsible for Super Mario Brothers 2. Initially in these works, I was using the NES characters as a way to troll Thomas Kinkaid’s work, as he always seemed to me like he was a pompous master of self-promotion and schmaltz. But after a while, I began to really appreciate the naive beauty of the Mario 2 characters, their economy of form and their wild inventiveness.”

Dave Rittinger | Dave Rittinger is a Brooklyn-based artist and designer whose work is often playful, contextual, and opportunistic. Embodying a sense of humor and dueling spirit of critique and optimism, he makes work that relates to our contemporary place in time through the embrace of wry subject matter and eccentric selection of materials. His sculptures and prints use brightly playful objects like neon squirt guns and toy soldiers to touch on larger issues like the normalization of violence.

George Spencer | Originally a young street artist, under the tag name MIZER since the age of 14, Spencer draws inspiration from the street art and culture of New York City. After attending SVA and living in the East Village, this series of boxers are now Spencer’s sole focus. Since 1989 (the date of his first use of the subject matter) Spencer has created over 1,000 pieces in the series. In discussing his choice of subject with Erika Stahlman of The Aesthete, Spencer stated “I am a loner, and boxers tend to be loners. And I’m a fighter, like most of us. But sure, there are people that don’t struggle in life. And those people don’t get it, those people don’t get my art.”

Joash Tuinstra | Originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Joash Tuinstra graduated with a BFA from Kendall College of Art and Design in 2006. He currently lives and works in the West Village. Through painting, Tuinstra explores explores style and originality related to art. His work in Pop Authentic investigates the concept of branding, trends in artistic style, and the gap in communication between art and culture.

Pop Authentic will open at the Recession Art Gallery and the Invisible Dog Center (47 and 51 Bergen Street) on October 26th. The show will be open in both locations through November 3rd, and will continue at Recession Art exclusively through November 24th.