Yulia Topchiy
SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2016

reConstruct presents a group of emerging and mid-career artists working in different medium who revise their earlier practices, effectively copying their metadata and translating it into new works, thus mimicking the conditions of the original. reConstruct begins with a self-taught, outsider artist, Amy Silver, who will restage her Greenpoint studio in one of the rooms or facilities at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show, where she will draw, as she normally would, for the duration of the fair. Silver’s act of transporting her studio from a private to public domain—much like the act of copying and pasting a line of text—allows us to recontextualize its content. Both her experience as the artist, and the viewer’s experience, are fundamentally altered.

A wall installation by Zdravko Toic resembling organic, microbiological matter consists of the artist’s previous collages, shaped into a coherent whole by removing parts or pasting them in a different order. Toic's work itself derives in part from his absorption with imagery found in medical records and textbooks. The work is timely in its depiction of scenes and moments that indicate immediacy, vitality, and presence. It is timeless in its evocation of both ancient evolutions and a post-human future. Both abstract and representational, expressive and descriptive, the work reveals the embodied self as spacially and temporally layered, as process, permeable barrier, and metabolic prosody.

Jim Gaylord’s collages are assembled from heavy paper that is cut out, painted, and pieced together into relief-like pictures. The imagery is comprised of film stills, geometry, iconography, and fragments of his previous work, manipulated digitally and through drawings to create new compositions. The results are uncanny abstractions with traces of figuration that point toward multiple narrative directions. In his photographic series, Owen Dodd presents a new body of work that is based on the act of revising the sites of previous “failed” photographs, and revising the analysis of the environment. While copying the context of the original images, the revisitations result in entirely new interpretations of the settings at hand. Thomas Spoerndle’s wall installation layered with paintings explores his recent interest in treating his various practices as a set of building blocks. Cross-pollinating separate bodies of work, he rearranges the building blocks, adding and subtracting, copying and pasting elements in order to allow for the possibility of new contexts with which to explore the nature of thought and perception.