Vincent Price Art Museum presents The Signal and the Noise by York Chang

Vincent Price Art Museum presents The Signal and the Noise by York Chang

On View Through: April 13 – July 20, 2019
Opening Reception: April 13, 2019, 5-7 PM

York Chang: The Signal and the Noise considers relationships between images and text, and ways in which collective action is influenced by public spectacle and new forms of propaganda. In this project, Chang employs mixed media strategies, appropriating newspapers, graphic displays, found images, and sculpture, to create an immersive environment with artworks that question how information is disseminated and consumed.

Chang considers what artist Hito Steryl has referred to as a prevailing condition of groundlessness in our present moment, where the social foundation for political belief systems has lost stability, and in which images compete for relevance across a sea of data, registering some patterns of information as truth (the signal), while other important information gets dismissed as invalid (the noise). The exhibition include works such as a collapsed balcony, signaling a lost horizon line, a floor piece comprised of thousands of photo-collages of images drawn from political, cultural, and mass entertainment sources, and constructed newspaper clippings that co-mingle excerpts from poetry, fiction and cultural theory.

As the boundaries between entertainment and politics collapse in our visual environment, aesthetics in political images can work to desensitize the viewer to the pain and suffering of others, or it can overwhelm through distraction and spectacle. But aesthetics in politics can also bring attention to covert disasters, transmit the emotional weight of narratives of oppression, and clarify moral truths. Chang’s exhibition questions how we find our bearings, how do we find truth in poetry, prose, and reportage when they all exist on the same groundless plane, when we may all be descending together in freefall.

Vincent Price Art Museum
East Los Angeles College 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez Monterey Park, CA 91754-6099
(323) 265-8841
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 12 pm. to 4 pm.
Thursday 12 pm. to 7 pm.
Closed on Sundays, Mondays.
Map It
Visit Website



PREVIOUS

NEXT