With the inaugural ComplexCon fast approaching this weekend, the people behind POW! WOW! are prepping their contribution – a living area with artist driven furniture from the likes of Risk, Sharktoof, Persue and others, as well as a gallery with original art from Yoskay Yamamoto, Aaron De La Cruz, Tristan Eaton and more. Created in partnership with Big Bad Wolf, Thinkspace, Cool Sofa, and Imprint, the area’s largest attraction though is probably a large scale installation from James Jean (interviewed) that visitors will be able to take a piece of from.
“Veils is an interactive work created by the artist James Jean and comprised of 4,800 tiled images, arranged sequentially and collected into separate volumes. Conceived as a form of sky-burial for the artist’s body of work, Jean invites viewers to descale the installation by peeling away pages from each volume in order to excavate underlying layers of images. The work transforms and degrades as each veil is removed, unfolding in a series of hallucinatory images and drawing the viewer deeper into an exploration of memory. Requiring the participation of the crowd, the decomposition of the installation will reveal a subtle logic behind the shifting perceptions and narratives of the artist’s body of work. At the end of the installation, the work will have been picked clean and defleshed. The veils, scavenged and scattered at the hands of its collaborators, are meant to be returned to the external world from which they were originally derived. The veils become a dream attenuated at the hands of the crowd, stretched into a thin membrane of memory radiating across the landscape.”
Discuss James Jean here.
