tl;dr

Team (gallery, inc.) is pleased to announce a solo show of work by New York-based artist Cory Arcangel. Entitled tl;dr, the exhibition will run from 14 September through 09 November 2014 and will inaugurate our project space in Los Angeles. Team (bungalow) in located at 306 Windward Avenue in Venice, CA. Concurrently, our 47 Wooster Street space in New York will house an additional show by Arcangel under the same title.

Arcangel’s work has long dealt with the status conferred upon differing cultural ephemera: the privilege endowed so-called Fine Art as compared to the visual vernacular of “lowbrow” pop culture. Much of his early work consisted of hacked Nintendo cartridges; for Super Mario Clouds, a particularly epochal work, he removed all visual content from a copy of Super Mario Brothers, leaving only the drifting clouds of the game’s background. This work was shown in Team’s original Chelsea basement space in 2003, and was then included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Concepts like “8-bit” and “hack” — so suspect to the art world of 2003 — have been completely assimilated with this renegade work being exhibited in 2012 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

For this exhibition — his first in Los Angeles — the artist is showing several of his historic video game works running on cheap tablets and Smartphones via a Nintendo emulator. This gesture further complicates the works’ established relationship with appropriation and contextualization, while also acting as a miniaturized retrospective for this aspect of his oeuvre. The fact that visitors will be able to physically access the images’ supports by handling the tablets and PDAs also aids in this process of canon-debunking.

The devices will be presented on grooved, wooden display racks, as they might at a commercial electronics outlet. While the original pieces relied upon grand presentation and white cube context to establish their Fine Art status, this gesture acts almost in reverse, using the now-iconic body of work to elevate (and fetishize) the consumer technology. The exhibition serves as a kind of funhouse mirror reincarnation of those early works, retaining parts of their power and significance but also providing them with a new, highly contemporary existence.

In addition to the Nintendo pieces, the installation will include elements that highlight other aspects of the artist’s career. Acrylic magazine cases containing issues of Arcangel’s The Source zines — physical documents of the code he has written for his myriad projects — are presented alongside objects from his recently founded merchandise line Arcangel Surfware, which are hung retail-style from display hooks. Commercial-grade plastic shelves contain a selection of semi-obscure CDs and DVDs —  Nick Lachey's, A Father's Lullaby for example. Audio will be provided by a Sony iPod doc playing mp3s related to Kelly Clarkson’s 2004 song Since U Been Gone, a recurring motif in Arcangel’s production. 

During the past two years, Arcangel has completed several diverse projects outside the space of the gallery. He worked extensively with a team of researchers and computer experts in collaboration with The Andy Warhol Museum to unearth and preserve Warhol’s lost digital experiments, which he wrote about for the summer edition of Artforum. This past May, he launched the aforementioned publishing and merchandise imprint, Arcangel Surfware, whose products include bedsheets, iPad covers, and magazines. In July, he released his debut novel, Working On My Novel, published by Penguin.

The 36-year old Arcangel has been the subject of numerous international monographic exhibitions at both galleries and major museums, including The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, The Whitney Museum in New York, The Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, The Barbican in London and MoCA in Miami. His work is included in many public collections, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, MoMA in New York, The Tate in London, Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington D.C. and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich.

We are excited to open Team (bungalow) in Los Angeles, our first exhibition space outside of New York City. The space, housed in a bungalow and a one-car garage, is quite possibly the smallest gallery in the city of Los Angeles. Our plan is to alternate exhibitions by artists represented in New York by Team, along with solo shows by artists from other galleries whose work excites us. Exhibitions by Margaret Lee, Pierre Bismuth and Bradley Kronz are forthcoming.

Gallery hours are Friday through Sunday, noon to 6 PM. For further information and/or photographs, please call 310.339.1945.