SOCIETY OF THE

PSEUDO-SPECTACLE

Frank Ebert & Matthew Hughes Boyko

Curated by Mike Bianco

June 20th - July 9th

Opening:

June 20th from 7 - 11p.m.

When considering the past forty years in retrospect, one might position Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle as one of the most prophetic texts of its time. Our media, proliferating "Shock and Awe" military engagements and halftime nipple shots, incessantly bombards our culture with screaming guitar solos, "talk-radio" pornography, "reality" living situations, and fantasy virtual realities. While this image culture seems largely uncontested, there is - to borrow a term from the Situationist International - an image culture of Détournement, or a production of images that satirically parody the 'society of the spectacle.'

It is under the auspices of this 'Society of the Pseudo-Spectacle' that the work of Matthew Hughes Boyko and Frank Ebert can be seen in parallel. For both artists, the spectacle of eroticized rock music serves as a platform to problematize our media-based image culture.

In Boyko's video work, the vernacular of the music video is used to make a self-reflexive critique of the Rock-Star aesthetic. In these videos, Bokyo augments the rock-video cliche of an enraptured female, doused in milk and surrounded by leather-clad band members. Instead, Boyko turns the aesthetic on its head, by using the realities of the same situation to show how negative or ridiculous the spectacle of a rock video actually is.

In Ebert's work, the Ab-Ex aesthetic is conflated with the paradigm of "sex, drugs, and rock and roll". In these paintings, a combination of abstraction and photo-realism, the gestures of an Ab-Ex painter can be seen as an analog to the rock performance standardized by musicians such as Eddie Van Halen. These traits, in combination with Ebert's hyperrealist rendering of human appendages and genitals, create a hyperbolic, critical satire of the images and techniques used in the production of the work.

While neither of these artists seems to be creating an explicit, or aggressive attack on our image culture, both offer a subtly subversive perspective from which to re-consider the direction of it.

Matthew Hughes Boyko

Frank Ebert