List of Participants

Mark Chariker
Nelson Da Costa
Reese Inman
Brian Knep
Harvey Loves Harvey


Fresh Produce presents:
Kayla Risko

Check out pictures from our opening covered by Big Red and Shiny here

Control, Option, Escape
Curated by
Reese Inman

October 20 - December 2, 2006

October 20 Opening Reception:
6:00 pm :: Gallery Talk
5:00-8:00 pm :: Reception

Experiences propagated by technology dominate 21st century life as never before. As a result, media saturation and information overload permeate our daily existence.

Control-Option-Escape brings together six artists whose work responds in varied ways to contemporary experiences of media/information technology. The exhibition title takes three words common to the generic computer keyboard as metaphors for their responses.

Through mass media, images advertising potential control over every aspect of our lives – products to make us irresistibly attractive, products to help us gain wealth or fame – coexist with images that make us feel utterly bereft of control, images of disaster, war, disease, and poverty. Of course, we always have the option of changing the channel, or clicking on a potentially more pleasing hyperlink. But to what degree do we escape? Images, once viewed, remain with us on some level.

Narratives common to our preferred modes of entertainment/escape might be said to reflect an attempt to control or pacify the images that most trouble us. In disaster movies, the protagonists typically survive. In video games, if we play long enough, we achieve higher levels, greater powers, bigger guns. In animé films, good and evil are rendered in broad strokes, and good generally triumphs in the end.

The work in this exhibition addresses the complexity and contradictions of our media-saturated world from a range of artistic perspectives. Ambivalence toward control/authorship, absence of tidy resolution, and the blurring of lines between the human and the technological predominate.