Daily Lazy: JEREMY SHAW at LAMBDALAMBDALAMBDA / Prishtina, Kosovo

JEREMY SHAW

Degenerative Imaging in the Dark

03.10.2015 - 06.12.2015

at:

LAMBDALAMBDALAMBDA

St. Garibaldi 1, 10000 Prishtinë

Kosovo

Jeremy Shaw: Exhibition View, Jeremy Shaw, LambdaLambdaLambda

Jeremy Shaw, Degenerative Imaging (2 Years Crystal Meth)

Jeremy Shaw, Degenerative Imaging (3 Years Cocaine)

Jeremy Shaw, Degenerative Imaging (8 Years Substance Abuse)

Jeremy Shaw, Degenerative Imaging (Drug-Free)

Jeremy Shaw, Degenerative Imaging (Early Dementia)

Jeremy Shaw, This Transition Will Never End, 2008 – ongoing,

Single channel video, silent, currently 19'23" (4 minute excerpt)

Jeremy Shaw works in a variety of media to explore altered states and the cultural and scientific practices that aspire to map transcendental experience. Often combining and amplifying strategies from the realms of conceptual art, ethnographic film, music video, mystical and scientific research, Shaw proposes a post-documentary space in which disparate ideals, belief-systems and narration are put into crisis.

For his exhibition at LambdaLambdaLambda, Shaw presents “Degenerative Imaging in the Dark” - a series of light-activated, glow-in-the-dark vinyl cut-outs made in reference to commercially produced star and planet stickers. Rather than the cosmos, the artist’s source material comes from 3D SPECT scan renderings of the degenerative effects of mind-altering substance use on the blood flow and metabolism of the human brain. The representational language of neuroscience, or at least the populist aesthetic familiar in health and pharmaceutical advertising, is reformatted here as a mechanism to enhance altered states while viewing their supposed biological effects on the brain.

The prints are charged by fluorescent light once every 30 minutes, causing them to glow strongly and slowly fade, glow and fade; static time-based mediums on repeat.

Also on view is the most current version of “This Transition Will Never End” (2008 – present) - Shaw’s ongoing archive of appropriated footage taken from a wide variety of movies and television in which a vortex, or any such tunnel- like or spiraling image, is used to represent the slippage of time or a transition from one reality to another. This constantly updated work serves as a catalogue of the varying styles and techniques used to create this commonplace depiction of the ubiquitous phenomenon that remains impossible to document.

* All images are courtesy of the artist, LAMBDALAMBDALAMBDA, and Koenig Galerie, Berlin