CFGNY, Phil Chang, Barnett Cohen, Bethany Collins, Liz Deschenes, Kota Ezawa, Corinne Jones, Gina Osterloh, Stephanie Syjuco, Stewart Uoo, and Anicka Yi

RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present Victory Over the Sun, inspired by the 1913 Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun in which Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square debuted. The black square represented a repudiation of all past images in order to start anew to forge a utopian vision and society. In a time when we have become enslaved to images fed to us via the digital infrastructures that dictate how and what we consume visually, this exhibition celebrates contemporary works that rebel against the generation of images created to serve the endless demand for content. It will feature a selection of work in a variety of mediums by contemporary artists exploring ideas of negation, interpretation, voids, spirituality, physicality, and impermanence, all of which refuse to be captured as an image.

The absurdist opera depicted allegorical strongmen, bolstered by new technologies like airplanes, who fought a battle with the sun to repudiate old values and make a new world. Malevich wrote, “The black square is the antithesis of the sun, the anti-sun. It swallows the light, but it seems to be charged with energy.”

Throughout history, artists have often sought to create new forms of expression as a way to challenge the society in which they lived. In the early twentieth century, we saw the birth of Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism and then conceptual practices in the 1960s, such as Minimalism, land art, institutional critique and later on, relational aesthetics, all of which addressed the inadequacies of the dominant art forms at the time. Lucy Lippard wrote that conceptual artists used “the power of imagination” to “escape from cultural confinement.” Each of these moments were times of unrest that pushed artists to think of new ways to express their desire for social change.

Today, our contemporary capitalist society has been overpowered with digital technology bombarding our every second of existence with images, whether advertisements, TV shows, video content, photos of everything imaginable available on our phones, tablets, and monitors. This exhibition proposes that we step back and think about how to harness our humanity and our capacity to imagine as well as engage our physical human presence and attention. The works on view refuse to contend with the onslaught of images we are faced with, and cannot be easily reproduced via social media. We invite viewers to experience the work in person, to slow down and contemplate new possibilities.