The Exhibition
An exhibition of the KlompChing Gallery in New York
CURIOUS DEVICES & OTHER OBJECTS JEANETTE MAY MAX DE ESTEBAN REBECCA HACKEMANN
KlompChing Gallery. A gallery in New York run by Debra KlompChing and Darren Ching since 2007, which quickly emerged as a Contemporary Art gallery. The gallery opened in Dumbo in Brooklyn in 2007 and has since presented national and international artists. It has also contributed to public exhibitions and works with private clients to help them organize their own exhibitions. Since 10 November, the renowned gallery has been showing a new exhibition called "CURIOUS DEVICES & OTHER OBJECTS" and it features works by the artists Jeanette May, Max De Esteban and Rebecca Hackemann. The exhibition exposes a whole new side of the aesthetics of technology. The exhibiting artists combine the coldness and distance of technology and the fascination of art, creating an entire new perspective on the field of technology.
Jeanette May: CURIOUS DEVICES
Jeanette May explores the world of still life through the staging of various electronic devices. Among the objects on display are Bluetooth headphones, antique stereoscopes and clocks or alarm clocks in art deco style. The material, color and style of each object reflects the spirit of the times as well as the technological progress of the respective period. Surrounded by walls covered with damask and expensive silk, the artist emphasizes the elegance of the technological devices.
Jeanette May was born in 1963 and still lives and works in Brooklyn. She is also known for her playful but critical approach to staging itself. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from CalArts University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Illinois. Her early training as a painter is evident in her carefully arranged compositions and rich color palette. The artist has won many awards, including from the NEA and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. Today she teaches at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City and has settled in Brooklyn.
Surrounded by expensive silk and walls covered in damask, the artist emphasizes the hidden elegance of technology. The colors of the paintings seem to explode, and the compositions of her still life are reminiscent of 17th century Dutch Vanita still life. Some devices, like the film projector, she even opens in her artworks, and we can also see tools like a screwdriver lying next to the antique objects. The urge to save, to repair the device is awakened. This also raises an important question at the same time. What happens to the technological devices that no longer work or cannot be updated? Jeanette May has already expressed her enthusiasm for still life in a previous series called "Tech vanitas". One can clearly identify her work as hers, as both series are very similar in style and concept. She has definitely found her own personal niche in art.
Max de Esteban: Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral
Max de Esteban, on the other hand, focuses on the individual parts of technology and creates a new whole from the individual, small components. His work, which bears the name "Proposition One: Only The Ephemeral", could almost be compared to X-ray photographs from an older time. With care and determination, he takes each object apart, paints them with white paint and reassembles them - but not without photographing each step of the reconstruction. His art is reminiscent of the creation and processing of art itself.
Max was born in Barcelona, Spain. He has lived and worked in Palo Alto, New York, Madrid and also in London. In 2009, he opened his first permanent studio in Barcelona and since then has focused exclusively on personal, project-based work. He is an artist who works mainly in photography and video, and whose work is best known for its exploration of the human condition under a technological regime.
His projects have been exhibited in museums and institutions such as the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Deutsches Technik Museum in Berlin, the Virreina Centre de l'Imatge in Barcelona, the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
His recent solo exhibitions include: Propositions, Uno Art Space, Stuttgart, Germany, 2013; Elegies of Manumission, FotoQuartier Gallery, Vienna, Austria, 2013; Proposition One. Festival de la Luz, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2012; Elegies of Manumission, Central European House of Photography, Bratislava, 2012 and Proposition One. Klompching Gallery, New York, USA, 2011.
Rebecca Hackemann: Nostalgia Technika
The guest artist Rebecca Hackemann works with camera-less, wet, collodion photograms on metal, which stimulate the feeling of nostalgia for many old and forgotten technology. For the old cassettes, for example, which have adorned every living room for a long time or still do, or vinyl discs, the faithful companions that still fill one or the other house with music today. Rebecca Hackemann uses a technique that is in part even older than the technology itself, which she depicts in her works. The photograms show the objects 1 to 1, which creates a certain reality in the photograms and helps the imagination all the more.
Rebecca Hackemann grew up in Bavaria and spent a short time in a British boarding school before attending art school in England. At boarding school, she had taken the opportunity and chance to get hold of the key to the dark room, which opened the door to the art world for her. She was taught by Laura Mulvey and Victor Burgin and holds a PhD from Chelsea College of Art (2019) and an MFA from Stanford University in California. For 11 years she was based in New York where she was part of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study program. Until she decided to move to Kansas and London, where she can still be found today.
In 2021, this work will be shown at the Museum of Photography in a major survey exhibition of American photographic artists. Since 1996 she has been active in her studio and also in the exhibition business. Many and also different exhibitions have already profited from her works.
Technological Artifacts thus brings together three very different artists. All three have recognized the aesthetic side of technology and technological objects, which can be difficult to grasp, and have decided to examine them more closely or make them the central object of their art. It feels like the last homage to the technologies of the past before they gracefully make way for the new and fade into oblivion.
Contact
Klompching Gallery
Darren Ching and Debra Klomp Ching
89 Water Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
United States of America
+1 212 7962070
info@klompching.com
www.klompching.com
Article about Klompching Gallery
Author
Katharina Schmitz, born July 28, 2000 in Wipperfürth
Studies: Literature, Culture, Media and Media Science
Internship: 2021 at studio Thomas Kellner
Interests: Music, literature, adventures
