Siebren Versteeg: Daily Times, Dorfman Projects, NYC

Siebren Versteeg: Daily Times
Dorfman Projects, New York
October 2012 - March 2013

Dorfman Projects presents Daily Times, by Siebren Versteeg. The project, on exhibition from October 2012 through March 2013, features Daily Times (Performer), a real-time, Internet enabled, digital program and new digital works on paper.

Each morning, in tandem with NYTimes.com's daily update, a scan of the printed front page of the day's newspaper automatically downloads to a free standing 70" LCD monitor. Siebren Versteeg's algorithmic program immediately gets to work; continuously generating a painterly abstraction that is forever in progress. Strokes are placed slowly, picking up on the particularities of color and composition of the day's given layout, while simultaneously displaying a nearly endless variety of color, density, and breadth. As digital paint builds up and drips down the page, its layering effects obstruct and obliterate their newsroom source, transforming a morning's cursory glance into an evening's aesthetic event.

Daily Times illustrates Siebren Versteeg's continuing interest in the circulation of information in the digital realm and the algorithms that guide its flow. By tapping into and manipulating live information sources he creates artworks that philosophically engage our notions of agency, choice, and chance; looking critically at the systems used for the dissemination of images within our culture, as well as with the malleable technological possibilities implicit in their construction.

The exhibition includes a selection from Siebren Versteeg's Good Times series, a body of abstract compositions digitally generated at resolutions of over 100 megapixels. These works, again results of Siebren Versteeg's complex painting algorithms, are output to monumental scales (89 ½ x 55") through meticulous piecing together of many smaller inkjet prints. Unlike the Daily Times project, these prints capture and immortalize the artist's hand in one infinitesimal moment in time. The juxtaposition of these unique works on paper, with Daily Times (Performer) creates a dialogue that immediately calls into question concepts of infinity, time, and fate versus free will.

SIEBREN VERSTEEG, born in 1971, lives and works in New York. His work is in the collections of numerous well-known collectors, nationally and internationally, as well as in the permanent collections of The Guggenheim, NYC; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; MCA, Chicago, IL; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and Yale Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. November, 2012 Versteeg will participate in "New, New York" at ESSL Museum in Vienna, Austria.

DORFMAN PROJECTS
529 West 20th Street #7E, New York, NY 10011
www.dorfmanprojects.com