Tony Oursler @ Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong

Tony Oursler, Priv%te
Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong
January 14 - March 5, 2016

TONY OURSLER

9_z, 2015

aluminum, paint, LCD screen

49.25 x 41.5 x 4.5 in.

125.1 x 105.4 x 11.4 cm

Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

Lehmann Maupin presents PriV%te, a solo exhibition of new sculptural multimedia works by New York-based artist Tony Oursler. It is the artist’s sixth solo show with the gallery. The exhibition features a mix of colorfully animated head-shaped panels inset with video screens.  Inspired by the phenomenon of facial recognition, these wall-mounted works visualize a composite of digitized facial features and the algorithms designed and aggregated from them. These works maintain Tony Oursler’s longstanding interest in the role technology plays in human behavior, as digital media continues to permeate every aspect of daily life. The artist will be present for an opening reception on Thursday, January 14th, from 6-8PM.

In this new body of work, the artist focuses on the proliferation of big data and surveillance programs, but is particularly interested in the ramifications of facial recognition technology. This increasingly ubiquitous tool used across public, private, and government sectors tracks and identifies facial features, thereby allowing computers, for the first time, to achieve their own “vision” of us. These “data portraits” underscore Tony Oursler’s uneasy relationship with technology, surveillance, and all manners of data tracking. The artworks seem to gaze at the viewer, evoking the larger cultural question of who is watching whom. 

Inspired by the facial recognition techniques and algorithms currently in use in various public and private enterprises, including social media, Tony Oursler employs a web of geometric designs, scattered data points, and various registration nodes integral to the composition of each work. He incorporates computer etchings representing mapping techniques and baseline characteristics essential to facial recognition. Sourced by the artist online, these various diagrams reference of how "big data" processes, categorizes, and aggregates the individual today. For all of us facial recognition will soon be linked to biometrics, spending patterns, and all manner of information collection, which the artist sees the sum as a new portrait.

This work lends itself to larger considerations about the digital cultivation and capture of personal identity as well as how and by whom this tracking is used—topics Tony Oursler has studied and written on extensively, including methods for evading this detection. This body of work ultimately renders the technological realm from the counterpoint perspective of the machines that are increasingly modified to adapt human traits.

A pioneering figure of new media art since the early 1980s, Tony Oursler developed his early practice under John Baldessari at CalArts, where he formed longstanding relationships with several of his fellow students, including Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Jim Shaw. This context encouraged Oursler to work outside of traditional media structures, and experiment with cross-pollination between painting, sculpture, video, installation, performance, language, music, and sound. Oursler continues to pioneer the intersection of art and technology in multimedia works that have in turn inspired subsequent generations of artists working digitally and across media platforms.

TONY OURSLER (b. 1957, New York) received a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1979. Oursler’s extensive exhibition history includes recent solo shows at LUMA Foundation, Arles, France (2015); The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2014); Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev, Ukraine (2013); ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum Denmark (2012); Artsonje Center, Seoul (2012); and the retrospective exhibition Dispositifs, which traveled from the Jeu de Paume, Paris, to the DA2 Domus Atrium, Salamanca, and the Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen (2005). His work has also been included in major group exhibitions including Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque, SITE Santa Fe (2004), curated by Robert Storr. Oursler’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles; Goetz Collection, Munich; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Milwaukee Art Museum; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Saatchi Collection, London; Tate Modern, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The artist lives and works in New York.

Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong
407 Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street, Hong Kong
www.lehmannmaupin.com