![One River School Of Art And Design Presents "Video/Wallpaper"](https://www.newjerseystage.com/events2016/OneRiverSchool-Feb26.jpg "One River School Of Art And Design Presents "Video/Wallpaper"")
(ENGLEWOOD, NJ) -- ONE RIVER SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN is pleased to present “Video/Wallpaper”, an installation by artist Siebren Versteeg, opening Saturday, March 5, and continuing through Sunday, April 17. Versteeg will give an “artist talk” during the Opening Reception. The title of the exhibition comes from an outmoded term sometimes used to denigrate video works of uninstructive content. Versteeg's project however makes this idea literal, undertaking today's digital landscape as an opportunity to interrogate an age-old concern in the field of painterly abstraction — the negotiation between process and form.
“Video/Wallpaper” will feature a 28-ft. digital painting mural — Versteeg's largest exhibited work of this type to date — generated entirely by computer algorithms of his own design. The code Versteeg writes exemplifies his interest in notions of chance by steering a nearly infinite number of variables to explore the widest possibility of compositional outcomes. Juxtaposed with this printed work, "Decoy (1R)" 2016, a real-time screen based work based on identical algorithms, will act as a kind of stand in for the mural's immaterial maker; tirelessly generating a new composition on a 24-hour cycle for the run of the exhibition.
The works in “Video/Wallpaper” question the potential of aesthetic resolution through an ongoing conflict between automated process and articulated desire. Rather than embracing the deterministic processes promoted by out of the box imaging platforms, Versteeg identifies with the value of creative labor as it migrates towards digital ephemera. He writes: “My programs spin in unwieldy ways ensuring an ongoing struggle with incidents and accidents. I favor curiosity and visual complexity over prejudicial belief and execution. A very small percentage of the work that I create are then printed and stretched to hang as inconsequential artifacts of the true struggle that takes place; to find space for creative idiosyncrasy within the terrible certainty and finitude of the grid."
SiebrenVersteeg’s multimedia installations critically engage the systems used for creating and disseminating images within our culture. He mines the digital realm for content, manipulating computer code to meticuloulsly interrogate the relationship between instructed choice and consequential chance.
SiebrenVersteeg was born in 1971 in New Haven, Connecticut. He has had solo exhibitions at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; the Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; the Art Institute of Boston; Bellwether Gallery, New York; Ten in One Gallery, New York; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; and Max Protetch, New York. His work has been exhibited in group shows at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, Maryland; the Krannert Art Museum, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; and the National Museum of Art, Prague; among many others. Versteeg was a recipient of the Illinois Arts Council, Fellowship in 2005, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Merit Fellowship in 2004, and received the Stone Fellowship for Graduate Study from the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he received his Masters degree in 2004. Currently, he is an artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. He lives and works in Queens, New York.
Founded by Matt Ross in September of 2012 “one river” west of New York City, One River School of Art and Design has embarked on a mission to change art education in America. In a short window of time, our innovative art school in Englewood, NJ has taught thousands of students and established “a new direction in art education.” One River School's exhibition program is dedicated to presenting contemporary artwork from some of the most compelling emerging artists in the world.
