In Artplex Gallery’s first photography-centered group exhibition, Photosynthetic investigates the confluence of conventional photography and the subversion of the image. The exhibition presents an array of works that problematize the paradigms of what constitutes photography to scrutinize the nexus between the subject, the artist, and the spectator. Through an assortment of techniques such as digital manipulation and collage, the artists in this exhibition transcend the limits of the medium and present novel perspectives on the image-polluted world around us. The spectator is invited to ponder the agency of photography in shaping our cognizance of the world and to question the veracity of the images we are presented with.
Ben Martin was TIME Magazine’s first New York Bureau staff photographer covering wars, fashion, politics, arts, business, and sports for TIME, Life, Fortune, People, and Sports Illustrated for thirty-three years. He immortalized evocative images that defined the 1960’s such as Richard M. Nixon’s haggard 5 o’clock shadow, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march to Montgomery, Alabama, and John F. Kennedy’s grieving widow and children. His exhibited silver gelatin photographic prints are portraits of artists in their studios.
Marco Pittori has always worked with photography and uses his own or the licensed photographs of others, such as renowned Los Angeles photographer Brad Elterman. Pittori collects and edits the images, adding additional points of interest throughout the photograph. The current series of Marco Pittori’s multi-layered photographs are based on Brad Elterman’s iconic images “Behind the Beverly Hills Hotel, 1977.” The motifs are carefully placed and layered until they reveal a whole new reality.
Steven Nederveen’s work focuses on the changeable relationship we have with nature. Loving and destroying in the same breath. The darkness of the human psyche underlies many of his overtly positive and uplifting nature scenes. Oceans and forests are idealized, radiating an inner light that burns. This heightened effect corresponds to our own yearning for more, wanting to be at one with nature, to control it, to be moved by it, to tame it.
Ruxandra Cristina Bocin-Dumitriu was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1979 and was always fascinated by two, otherwise distinct, areas: art and technology. Studying both meant the artist got in very close contact with both hard programming (C++, Java, artificial intelligence) and pure graphic art studies. The unusual combination led to an ease of expression through technology as well as a special take on visual metaphors. Dumitriu’s elected themes investigate perception mechanisms, digital dimensions and technologies, media and broadcasting issues, surveillance society, and societal paradigm shifts generated by new technologies.
Since the opening of Artplex Gallery in 2018, the gallery continues to be one of the world’s leading art galleries specializing in high-quality, original contemporary art representing a broad spectrum of major international artists. Right at home in West Hollywood and within immediate proximity to its sister gallery Artspace Warehouse, Artplex Gallery is an expansive modern space that specializes in international urban, pop, graffiti, figurative, and abstract art catering to the visual impact.
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