about
MU TECHNOLOGY MEMEPLEX
01 pyramid 02 pole 03 chord 04 house 05 castle 06 cube 07 plant 08 mountain 09 window 10 chair 11 radiolarian 12 boat
01 gloss 02 fluorescence 03 earth 04 sky 05 matt 06 pool 07 cellular 08 splash 09 brick 10 gradient 11 floral 12 mirror
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In my past life, when i was a conquistadora, I got lost in the amazon down tiputini river, on a canoe with shamanic hepatoligitists who used estrous cycles to predict the future. We capsized and were rescued on the backs of alligators and ended up in a florescent village that was run by deranged cartographers who were mapping out elements that Mendeleev would never know about. Topological quantum computing with jungle potions, panther bones and protein receptors. The cartographers told me: “You have the most incredible cellular structure we’ve ever seen.” They mixed my hair with the reddish bark of a yew tree to make a phosphorescent wax. With the wax they constructed an idol. It had wires in its mouth. I connected the wires to my arm and received an infusion of a mitotic poison that sent me on a vision quest 500 years in the future where i was selling homemade healing machines and Tibetan ceremony daggers on Amazon, making viral videos of kittens sleeping with lions, lost in a crowded city of restaurants and atheists. When I came back I spent several weeks with the shamans and cartographers We discovered a cave of microscopic transistors and used them to build a canoe. We set it in the water, said our goodbyes and continued the journey downriver.
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Jeremy Couillard (b. 1980, Livonia, Michigan) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Couillard makes vibrant, hard-edged, acrylic paintings that incorporate video and sculptural elements, imagining new spaces and objects that out-of-control technology might create. His world is one of colorful and disorienting spaces filled with strange gadgetry and furniture that summon a bygone idea of possibilities and hopes we once had for technology. Couillard’s work has been exhibited across the United States and reviewed in New American Paintings and in a feature titled, “Tomorrow’s Art Stars Today” on the The Huffington Post. He holds a B.A. from Michigan State University and is a current M.F.A. candidate at Columbia University.
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My most recent work combines painting, video and sculpture to create an exaggerated, maximalist view of contemporary spaces and imagined technological wonderlands. The bright colors, taped-off edges and interactive surfaces of the paintings are amalgams of landscape and interior images as well as geometric designs that exist at some intersection of biology and technology. The viewer is often invited to interact with the artworks by turning knobs, pressing buttons, listening to sounds and watching embedded videos on digital screens.
Growing up in the American suburbs in the 1980s, the first things that I thought were beautiful were video games and cartoons. This newest body of work draws on a nostalgia for these things that is also informed by myriad other sources from Pop art and Futurism to modern medicine and archetypes of the occult. They call up an almost hallucinatory vision of the future as we thought it might look from the outlook of an illusory past, and question whether the exciting promises of new technologies are ever truly realized. In our increasingly networked world, we are at once attracted to new gadgets and disoriented by them, perpetually let down and waiting for the next innovation. We are living in a networked melancholy, and these paintings amplify that feeling: beautiful but anxious, crowded but lonely, and always a bit absurd.
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“In the early 20th century, a group of painters working under the umbrella of an artistic and social movement known as Futurism attempted to give visual form to a world that was being rapidly altered and accelerated by an overload of new technology. A century later, we find ourselves coming to terms with information overload, and it is not surprising that an increasing number of artists are interested in addressing this situation through their work. Jeremy Couillard’s maximal paintings put forth such a glut of visual information that they-by their very fracture-offer a visual analog to what we collectively experience on a daily basis. There is something both inviting and disturbing about the spaces that Couillard invites us into; his paintings teasingly suggest that we can somehow find order in chaos, but simultaneously thwart any attempt to do so.” – New American Paintings #93
