tinsquo: February 2025 Archives

Insidious Raft at Adjacent to Life

Adjacent To Life, presents Insidious Raft by Lars van Dooren.

029, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8.5” x 11”

Insidious Raft

Some fleeting constructions adrift in acid clouds. Graphite memories, speculative dead-ends, future objects. With casual biology and structural hesitance, they roam.

Marks of scruffy intuition and radiant dashes inform them.

Animal and sculptural kin.

Two medium size works disrupt the ether. More earthly. Grids and voids ground the terrestrial space.

With fresh limbs they gather in neon growth. Do they land or pass by?

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Lars van Dooren was born in the port city of Tacoma, Washington and received his MFA from a school in NYC.

Some exhibition locations include SEASON (WA), Honey Ramka Gallery (NYC), The Knockdown Center (NYC), Eastern Michigan University (MI), PRIMETIME (NYC), as well as the occasional subway station, partially abandoned building, and overlooked spaces in our urban environment. In these locations, his work is left for rot or removal.

He lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn with his family and also exists here.

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Insidious Raft is on view through March 21, 2025 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Artist's reception: Saturday, February 22, 7:00 - 9:00 pm.

Posted by Mark Roth at 08:18 AM

Groves: maestro_#107

acrylic on canvas, 16” x 20”

Posted by Mark Roth at 02:03 PM

Groves: millionaire_#106

acrylic on canvas, 16” x 20”

Posted by Mark Roth at 02:45 AM

Groves: bald_#105

acrylic on canvas, 16” x 20”

Posted by Mark Roth at 01:33 AM

Pop Stoppage: easy_#424

Soda bottle labels and acrylic on paper, 11” x 17”

Posted by Mark Roth at 02:05 AM

Pop Stoppages 2014-25

bottle labels and acrylic on paper, 11" x 17"

Posted by Mark Roth at 12:56 AM

Pop Stoppage: sconce_#423

Soda bottle labels and acrylic on paper, 11” x 17”

Posted by Mark Roth at 02:23 AM

Analog Augmented Reality, 2013 - 25

collage, various sizes

My exploration of Augmented Reality generated an analog series of collages that utilize similar principles in terms of formal composition. Employing an image of a sculpture as if it were an AR marker, I cut out the shape and slid in its place an alternate image – generally an inkjet proof of a painting or some other piece of 2D studio ephemera. (All of these materials are studio detritus, so there is an element of aesthetic upcycling, as well.)

The visual result is a masked painting that sits in a sculptural space. The painting element of the collage achieves pictorial depth by appearing to exist in the round.

Considered in the vernacular of Augmented Reality, this particular collage strategy represents a bit of conjecture about the functioning of perception. The image that is inserted into an Augmented Reality context exists only in the viewer’s device – their cell phone or tablet.

Metaphorically, I see this device as akin to consciousness or the perceptual apparatus through which one makes sense of the world. In this analogy, the AR overlay might be a scrim of prior experience/expectation that modifies perception. This idea of acknowledging pre-loaded content into image-making also finds expression in my use of magazine pages as a support for painting. Instead of using fresh white paper or canvas – which might imply perfection, or that the image arises out of the void – I frequently use a ground that already supports an image – a populated tabula rasa – to make the point that an image and the perception of an image are conditional and cumulative.

Posted by Mark Roth at 05:32 PM