Packer Schopf Gallery News

Hi....We want to start your Memorial Day weekend off with an artistic bang! Please join us this Friday night. You'll be glad you did!

Jason Lahr / Too Dumb for New York City, Too Ugly for L.A. / painting / work on paper
Jason Lahr's paintings and works on paper combine darkly comic texts with appropriated images to create shifting narratives of working class male identity as shaped by popular culture. The images are pulled from a wide range of popular and sub-cultural ephemera while the texts he writes are fragments that suggest their excision from a larger story, and give the reader/viewer flashbulb glimpses at moments of narrative action. His work combines the visual language of digital culture with traditional painting techniques and references to illustration, print media, and graphic design to create an intertextual web which addresses the articulation of masculine identity as manifested in Generation X and which is filtered through feminism and identity politics/criticism.

Kathy Halper / TMI (Too Much Information) / embroidery

"Kathy Halper's work mirrors adults' ongoing fascination with youth culture, imbuing it with today's hyper-social-networked edge. Marshall McLuhan predicted the advent of the Internet, suggesting the future of living in a global village that acts and reacts to the pulse of culture. He notes that it is not adults, but rather youth that instinctively and intuitively understand this type of "electronic drama." This is where Halper's work begins. Creating embroidered drawings from photographs of adolescents that she finds on social networking sites, Halper's work questions the disappearing space between public and private online, the subversive use of fabric, needle and thread, and the role of technology plays in shaping adolescence. Her work questions the ways we look, observe and connect with the youth of today, and stems from both her personal experience as a parent, a love of the homemade, and an awkward relationship with the Internet."

Excerpted from the exhibition essay by Alicia Eler.

Artist Talk and Video Screening with Kathy Halper
Saturday, June 15 @ 1PM

Krista Hoefle / LVL_GRNDR / prints / sculpture / video
Through the reinterpretation of videogame interactions and objects into physical spaces, sculptor Krista Hoefle is interested in revealing underlying or hidden aspects of game structure that are otherwise not apparent during regular game play. The exhibition LVL_GRNDR theorizes a new game environment through a series of prints, sculptures, and video--one that is impossible to win. LVL_GRNDR explores a variety of different game styles in the process: a 350-room D&D-style RPG map & module (Dungeons & Dragons Role-Playing Game), an endlessly scrolling 8bit landscape, a pc (or "player character") that refuses to l2p (or "learn to play"), to name a few.