Seth Price at Friedrich Petzel

Artist Jayson Keeling is one TI's key tipsters for filtering which shows to see in NY. Jayson knows I love the work of Seth Price and popped by his new show to snap some of the work on view. If Price's ingenious use of negative space is not an inspiration to every graphic designer out there, I don't know what is. Here's the official Friedrich Petzel press release. I love the succinct way it describe's Price's process in creating these images and I equally love the way this artist understands the ways the computer forces us all to re-imagine the idea of the image. Very easy to look at...but the result of complex thinking. This is an ideal, no?

SETH PRICE
February 9th - March 8th, 2008

Seth Price presents a new body of work, including flat
wall-sculptures in wood, plastic and metal, as well as
drawings. A book, to be published by The Leopard
Press, will be available at the gallery.

1. A computer search for the most basic terms:
'eating', 'drinking', 'writing', 'touching', 'mother,'
etc. The result might be a digital image, a "jpeg",
for example. The image depicts human interaction:
people kissing, someone being fed, a person laying a
hand on another's shoulder. The situation is familiar,
but not necessarily clear. At one point this was a
photograph, now shrunken, squeezed through the eye of
the needle, its information digitally compressed for
easy circulation and distribution. It appears as a
tiny, lapidary screen image, though we know that if
enlarged it will slip away, its edges decaying as the
effects of compression become evident.

Untitled Vintage Bomber:2005:Vacuum formed high impact polystyrene 33X 48

I worked all through the weekend, which I usually hate doing. One of the gigs was a shoot where a rising photographer friend of mine said "I like your Imagist thing. Its well put together, but I'm totally confused by it." Truth be told I'm completely confused by it too. After years of a love-hate tension with the thing, I have finally conceded that I'm seriously in love with the idea of fashion. Same for art. Or at least the idea of art. The relationship between the two, art and fashion, is the seed of the confusion my friend was invoking . Artists like Seth Price perfectly solve this conflict for me. Not because Seth Price is fashionable (god forbid!) but because he has really influential ideas about industrial images : the value of those images and the disposable nature of those images. Lately when I look at fashion images it occurs to me that all of fashion is a high grade form of industrial waste. Which possibly makes me love it more.