Seth Price

New York–based artist Seth Price developed the works in his exhibition “Tricks” from found Internet photographs of people carrying out everyday activities like eating, drinking, writing, and shaking hands. Using Photoshop, he removed the figures and blew up the negative spaces, which he then cut out of wood veneer. The results are amorphous grained forms with flat, shining surfaces, which the viewer initially takes to represent abstract landscapes. It is only on closer observation that one sees the figures and actions. In a smaller, more portable investigation of the same subject, the forms have been printed on gold-coated Dibond plates. In his practice, Price uses many media—video, sculpture, performance, and often text, which he uses to add another layer of meaning to his works, or at least to stage the fiction of meaning. To that end, the statement accompanying the exhibition is brief yet richly suggestive. It describes the process of making the works: A private photograph is circulated on the Internet and hence given a compressed, digitized life. It is then “stretched” (released from its JPEG compression) and, via “industrial” methods, rematerialized and brought back to life—but only as the frame for something missing. So now the pictures hang, decorative and flat. Given their perfect design, the discourse on virtual and material reality seems somewhat beside the point. There are, however, two readings that seem equipped to relate the statement to the works: The text is an ironic critique of the tendency to read art through theoretical discourse; or it is an elaborate advertising slogan for the product (art) being sold.