Financial District, New York
Group Exhibition
Haircuts
Yeche LangeEarl, Wretched Worm, Valerie Keane, Jared Madere, Evil Biscuit, Yasmin Kaytmaz, Pauly Stone Jiva Haircuts is the inaugural exhibition at Yeche Lange’s 11 Broadway gallery in New York after exclusively presenting work on-chain the last two years. Earl’s oeuvre is a deep study of modern dex-trading. His trader fiction writing and chart paintings both dramatize the emotional and physical experiences associated with an otherwise coldly quantified subject matter. Serving as historical freeze frames of significant events in the rise and fall of coins, his paintings work the double meaning of candle to memorialize the profits and losses which exalt as they destroy real lives. Chart Paintings have been presented at Shore Gallery, Graham Vunderink Gallery, and Cafe Milano. In accelerated and delirious prose, his trader fiction writing further elucidates the trader’s experience while historicizing it within a larger arc of futures trading beginning with the Dutch East India Company. This line of investigation, which Earl continues to pursue, uses the variation between mediums to situate the artist as a fictional entity. Wretched Worm’s texturally rich compositions have staked a claim on the screen’s ability to generate physical sensations of touch. Working at the edge of stable diffusion techniques, he has synthesized wood carving, gestural frosting frames, frostbitten liver cubes, and a large set of semi-gelatinous pins, among other projects, to reset the bounds of digital image making beyond realism. His physical work has been presented at Meow 2. As a writer, his online contributions have played a pivotal role in naming the spiritual stakes of contemporary networked experience. Wretched Worm is a co-founder of Galerie Yeche Lange. Valerie Keane makes suspended sculptures from acrylic and fibreboard cutouts fastened and speared by stainless steel brackets and rods. They demonstrate a variety of methods for joining high-precision industrial materials together, from the common hex screw or twist-tie, to the more severe ring binding or eyelet fastener. The cutouts have diverse shapes resembling skeletal systems, weapons, chronological mechanisms, and sigils which are then overlaid and suspended amidst one another to form a unified body. Many feature bent trusses which attest to a tension or latent kinetic energy which is held in equilibrium by the greater system, a self-organized object from the afterlife of a runaway industrial age. Her work has been exhibited at Lomex, High Art, Dallas Contemporary, amongst other venues. Jared Madere is an artist and curator whose work has been exhibited internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Le Magasin, Amager Bakke, The Istanbul Biennial, and The Watermill Center, amongst other venues. His immersive installations include diverse and unstable materials such as raspberries, terrazzo, calf blood, hardtack, sleeping bags, and letter sealing wax. Madere has spoken on AI media synthesis at Art Basel Switzerland, Kulturværftets Copenhagen, and has published numerous essays on the topic. Working with custom models trained on archives of popular fashion and lifestyle photography combined with bespoke auto composition pipelines, Madere pushes the discipline of image-making beyond single shot generative techniques or painstakingly labored digital painting to the domain of a secret third thing. Madere is a co- founder of Galerie Yeche Lange. Evil Biscuit’s Drifella project brought formal attention to the PFP layering assembly which was an afterthought for community-minded projects thus far. The chaotic traits and overlays of the collection, along with its repeated dark- jester figures expressed a participation but revulsion with the status quo of image generation. Instead of producing a set of images that sought alignment and group homogeneity, Drifella, Drifella 2, and Card NFT are all projects which value disjunction and destructive heterogeneity as a primary aesthetic. The latter uses trading card game scans as a canvas for Biscuit to scratch, smear, and collage fragmented overlays with the textural specificity and compositional sensitivity of abstract painting. Yasmin Kaytmaz’s sculptures are made out of various materials including lead, paper, tape, foil and wood glue with large phrases like ‘How many miles to Babylon’ and ‘Watch til the end’ painted on top of iconographic silhouettes.However, the images move away from their personal stories, dismissing their iconic character, and become only realized by their shape. These are individuals who have fought to stand out so much they all become the same-flat, abstract shapes relevant only by a prefabricated context, often a screen. The materials focus on an anxious preservation, a redirected, mundane energy that gives sculptural depth to blank flat character silhouettes. Words taken from American novels or nursery rhymes concerned with finality enact the “spectacle death” in an ever moving American society that depicts heroism through a long standing devotion to one’s defined character. “Man is his own Star.” Pauly Stone Jiva began formally practicing art in 2017 while driving Lyft in the wake of the rapid ethically charged leap from Uber by many riders in the United States. This influx of revenue from their rideshare work allowed them to purchase a rack of NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti GPUs that became the backbone of their early ML experimentation. Jiva is known for developing the quad cross attention architecture of the popular image synthesis software ComfyUI and various other node suites. Haircuts marks the first presentation of Jiva’s ongoing collaboration with Jared Madere in a physical exhibition.