NEW YORK, NY.- Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery is presenting Act of Nature, the gallery's first solo exhibition of work by Yorgo Alexopoulos from April 20 – June 11, 2016. The show will feature the artist's new series of multimedia sculptures and video installations.
Harvesting and manipulating original cinematographic footage collected during sweeping travels that ranged from the sand dunes of the United Arab Emirates to the savannas of Namibia to the mountains of Canada's wild west and beyond, Alexopoulos presents a varied exploration of epic landscape images condensed to a universal language of symbols and archetypes.
Alexopoulos' works draw from a wide range of original media including his own paintings, digital renderings, photographs, and filmed footage. Influenced by cross-cultural mythology, especially that of his Greek heritage, the works in Act of Nature explore ways in which ancient cultures have personified nature in order to understand the origins and elements of the natural world. The unique cosmologies these systems of knowledge claim to reveal and decipher are central themes explored in his artistic practice.
In Act of Nature, Alexopoulos has turned his attention to human migrations and the resulting intermingling of disparate belief systems to explore the universalities that reach across cultures and eras. For example, in Split Swell, seven synchronized high-res screens present a moving journey across an ocean waterscape to an unknown and unimaginable destination. The split configuration of the screens speaks to the fractured dislocation of the passenger, drifting away from all things previously known towards the unknown. In addition to the icon of the ocean, ubiquitous emblems of different landscape motifs such as waterfalls, cliffs, deserts, mountains, and forests populate this series of work. Alexopoulos distills imagery of actual geography to its barest essential qualities. Reduced to archetypes rather than referencing any specific place, these images become symbols that are understood by all cultures.
This diverse collection of moving images and mixed-media objects presents an artist who is an early adopter of brand new technologies. To produce this single exhibition, Alexopoulos films in 4K video, makes use of translucent LCD video screens, Kuka robots, 3D printers, motorized dollies, and multiple cameras synchronously shooting time-lapse photography hundreds of yards apart. Custom fabricated steel and aluminum frames are carefully considered, doubling as sculptural layers in the form of the Euclidian shapes that are ubiquitous throughout the exhibit.
A former graffiti artist recognized for his contributions to the Los Angeles street art scene of the late 1980s, Yorgo Alexopoulos (b.1971) is now best known for creating contemplative artworks and installations using a variety of media. His large-scale, synchronized, digital video installations have been publicly presented on 42 massive LED screens in New York's Times Square, displayed on 432 LCD displays that surround the columns of the Cosmopolitan Hotel's lobby in Las Vegas, and projected cinematically at the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles. They have been installed permanently in public areas of the Roe Hotel Hotel in New York, the Langham Hotel in Chicago, and in a sky-lobby of the Norman Foster-designed Bow Building in Calgary.
