Hamburger Eyes Photo Epicenter is pleased to announce the opening of The Young Jerks on September 11, 2008, featuring the work of Brad Troemel, Bea Fremderman, Andrew Laumann, Jimmy Limit, Oscar Mendoza, Willa Nasatir, and Alexander Martinez.
I will be updating with images from the artists in the next two weeks leading up to the opening, so keep your eyes glued. Keep reading for the show statement……
Hamburger Eyes Photo Epicenter is pleased to announce the opening of The Young Jerks on September 11, 2008, a show of new photographs and images from seven rising artists. The title refers to members of the loosely related artistic and social group represented in this show. Their links to each other extend across America through a web of couch surfing, cross country journeys and internet coincidences. The work exhibited in The Young Jerks is a product of lifestyle artists, or artist’s lifestyles- depending on whether the chicken or the egg came first. Their art is a product of the social relationships they have, and many of the relationships they have are the result of an awareness of each others art. Each of the Young Jerks work examines the cast of characters around them. Art and friendship, negatives and top 8’s, prints and text messages are two stilts holding each other up. Without art the bonds that tie these social groups together wouldn’t be. Without a cultural awareness of what’s going on around them or without participation in that culture, their work doesn’t exist. How the seven of them synthesize this awareness or participation is what sets them apart.
Some show an unedited window into the upper echelons of America’s young bohemia. Alexander Martinez’s photography is a diary of personal and private moments, simultaneously honoring and mocking his own medium’s history. Andrew Laumann’s work is a mysterious presentation of American subculture, often juxtaposed with inanimate and abstracted objects. His is a display that alternatively informs and obscures the viewer’s read of the work. Brad Troemel’s multimedia projects are meditations on what the actions of today’s youth mean. He uses edited interventions to distinguish his opinions from participation while Willa Nasatir’s work straddles this line. Juxtaposing the fleeing memories of drunken debauchery with the specificity of the exact locations of those events on Google Maps, she highlights the immeasurability of human experience (happiness, fun, danger, etc.) Oscar Mendoza unlocks the paranormal and psychedelic though artifacts and evidence in his everyday surroundings. Jimmy Limit uses occult symbolism as a reference to the masonic nature of social networks, preying on the decontextualization all images fall victim to when they enter the lens of the camera. Limit makes the simplest objects haunted by using unexpected visual combinations. Bea Fremderman also uses image editing as a way of highlighting specific objects or gestures as being symbolic for larger cultural aspects.
The Young Jerks opens September 11 at 5:00 and closes at 9:00 pm at Hamburger Eyes Photo Epicenter, 26 Lilac Street, San Francisco, California. It runs until October 2nd.