|
From the Albright Knox Museum:
Gregory Kucera combines an art background with his technical skill in commercial video production to explore ideas about the ways in which our computerized, media-saturated world impacts how we see and experience it. Kucera intellectually and visually investigates qualities inherent in film and video – motion, perspective, duration, and simultaneity – in a variety of media including photography, painting, sculpture, and video installation. Eyeballer 6 is related to two other works, Line & Flight, a multi-channel video, and Temporal Relief: LA Extruded, Inverted, a polyurethane sculpture. The source of the imagery for all three of these pieces is an intersection in downtown Los Angeles. Kucera converted the colors, forms, and movement at the site into three distinct interpretations of that information.
The four channels of the video Line & Flight were shot facing north, south, east, and west with an exaggerated one-point perspective and from a point of view that alternates between that of a pedestrian standing in the middle of the intersection to that of someone flying through the same space upside down. The bas-reliefs on the sides of the cubic sculpture were carved from images of those same four views to physically embody the forms, space, and movement at the site. In the Eyeballer series, also based on the video views in Line and Flight, Kucera stretched and blurred fragments of the video to create a non-objective abstraction of the intersection, capturing time and motion in a static image. The series was made using the latest digital technology in a process has been recently named Ultrachrome. Eyeballer 6 is rear mounted to a special non-glare Plexiglas and backed with white Plexiglas stabilized by a custom fabricated aluminum frame. The use of high-tech methods and materials are integral to the work.
As the artist explained: “The Eyeballer series utilizes very unique and highly researched techniques in order to “push” not only the technical capabilities of current day imaging, but ideally that of the eye itself.”
— Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects
Copyright © 2004 The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy
The following article is taken from the press release for Kucera's recent exhibition at I-20 Gallery:
PONG FARM
Bred on Pong, the first video game, Gregory Kucera (no relation to Gallery) takes his inspiration from the complex relationship between the organic and synthetic. Pong Farm is his second solo exhibition at I-20.
In a series of sculptures, photographs, and several photo hybrids, Kucera brings an agrarian sensibility to the current day use of technology.
Technology practically grows on its own; thoughts turn into things faster than ever. This is literally true in the sculptures entitled Neural Groove, where the artist transforms his own brainwaves into Plexiglas. His wavy upright translucent blocks act like lenses or an upward running map. They were produced using an EEG (or electroencephalogram), which measures the electrical output of the brain during different states of consciousness, and these intangibles were translated into objects using rapid prototyping technology (a computer controlled milling machine).
Further challenging our physical limitations, Kucera turns dark into light in the series of photographs entitled Night for Day. Through only the manipulation of exposure settings, midnight becomes high noon in these works with artificial lighting that lingers on the fantastic.
In the works entitled Hole Erasures, a drill goes where the eye cannot: puncturing a landscape through Plexiglas like Swiss cheese.
Finally, the artist presents new works from his Eyeballer series, in which colors are taken from various mediated images and stretched into horizontal lines where figure and ground are irresolvable. Often the extension of time is represented as some form of linear artifact. The Eyeballer works take this to an absolute with a gaze cast upon consistently recurrent themes of media: from blood, violence, and sexuality to sand and vegetation.
Gregory Kucera was born in 1974, and received his MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. In 2005 his work will be included in Extreme Abstraction, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; he will also have a solo show at the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle (no relation).
Other recent exhibitions include Angles Gallery, Los Angeles; UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Center on Contemporary Art (COCA), Seattle.
From artscentral.com:
Gregory Kucera at Angles Gallery, Los Angeles
Gregory Kucera’s video and photographically-based works, titled Tessellation Anxiety (a reference to the cubes present) display keen wit and conceptual complexity. The centerpiece here is a four monitor video installation in which the four sides of an intersection in downtown Los Angeles are presented simultaneously. Pedestrians pass by and cars move through the intersection. All at once, as if from nowhere, a figure floats though the space.
All four images rotate 180 degrees, and we view the same scenario upside down. Kucera is interested in information overload and the small details that make each scene or setting different. He pairs his video work with a cube-shaped sculpture that physically presents all four sides of the intersection as well as a photographic work that reduces the colors in the video to an abstract linear composition. These works are presented in relation to a second videotape of a woman sitting in a chair in the corner of a room. The setting changes as if someone was clicking on a remote, and we see in turn various backgrounds go floating by. Kucera has paired this tape with a series of wall works in which the dot pattern of a halftone image of the scene depicted in the video is drilled into a piece of white Plexiglas so as to make a three dimensional photograph (Angles Gallery, Santa Monica).
Intervals and Inversions, 2002, at I-20 Gallery:
Gregory Kucera's installation "Intervals and Inversions" branches out into painting, sculpture, photography and video. The work is a post photographic investigation into relationships between the body and gravity, perspective, and information. Line and Flight is a multi-channel video which pulls the viewer away from a downtown pedestrian crosswalk on a trajectory through the streets of L.A. In the sculpture, Temporal Relief, the artist has scanned this same intersection and produced a physical inversion of negative space. Eyeballer abstracts color, line, and blur from Line and Flight to produce a photographic series that references the term used by skydivers to describe their visual process while falling to earth. The viewer is encouraged to mentally reconstruct the world from the disparate informational elements.
Kucera was born in 1974, and received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. His works have been exhibited at the Santa Monica Museum of Art; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); the UCLA Wight Gallery; and the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City. This fall he will be included in shows at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the UCLA Hammer Museum.
|
