Opening reception: Friday, May 19 from 6-8 PM

In some ways a lot has changed since Pablo Picasso first applied a scrap of woven cane from a chair into the artificial space of a canvas, but in other ways not much has changed at all. Jasper Johns contributed significantly to the subject with his 1955 “Target with 4 Faces,” where the “target” lives ingeniously between object, symbol, icon, contemporary painting motif, and human figure. It was an ingenious move that took retroactively too Picasso a step further towards the world of language. And countless other artists have continued that program of confronting meaning through appropriation and reappropriation, making it as relevant in 2023 as it was a century ago.

Picasso was working in the adolescence of industrialism and Johns was working in the dawn of post-structuralism, and both were pushing meaning and information into the future alongside the advanced social and technological guards. Artists today face their own set of real-world challenges, from web 3.0, to ecological instability, to the fragility of truth itself. And still the strategy remains surprisingly consistent. It’s the world doing most of the changing and art providing the stabilizing impulse. The world is indeed a moving target..moving faster than even in a post-everything age, with an endless array of reproductions, replicas, and repetition.

Author James Gleick noted in The Information, “when information is cheap, attention is expensive.” Information is very cheap right now, so the individuals on the front lines who are determined to sort it and parse-it are more relevant and necessary than ever. They are the custodians of information, but also, hopefully, the gatherers of attention.