Opening on Thursday, June 20th, the gallery will present the work of London-based artist, Keith Tyson (born 1969). This will be the artist's first one-person exhibition in New York, featuring five "Artmachine Iterations"- an ongoing project that he has been working on for the last five years.
In a wide range of media, Keith Tyson will introduce a group of works, that are all results of his Artmachine, i.e. physical manifestations of dictations from a system he has programmed. Rather than deciding himself what art to make, Tyson leaves this process up to his machine. A combination of a computer, flow charts and books, the Artmachine randomly selects or performs creative tasks and Tyson then turns its actions into art. "Initially it just made dots on paper, but I made it more and more complex until I would just do about anything. It took me five years to program it all, " as Tyson explains. Although these works cannot be seen as readymades - works whose physical existence preceded their existence as art objects - the iterations are neither related to the conventional intentions, meaning and function of art works. While avoiding the notion of illustration and expression, Tyson has no control over the proposals and demands from his machine.
The proposals/requests from The Artmachine range from instructions to become a standup comedian, from dismantling monuments and rebuilding them in other countries through to minimalist paintings. In the first piece in this show- "Inquiry into sequential cannibalism (wall drawing with supertwin air!eap vibro-spider recorder)" - the Artmachine asked Tyson to produce a wall drawing by running up a ramp designed for this purpose, while he is wearing a makeshift glove secreting ink. A 20ft. long 'fenderlaying dress' produced by the Artmachine is included in this piece and occupies the full height of the gallery wall, along with the drawing and the ramp.
An untitled photographic depiction on canvas of one of four possible objects - in this case a flower stall, but it could also have been a solar eclipse, a hammer or foreskin - was also requested by the artmachine. A brass plate beneath the image illustrates these four options, emphasizing the often randon occurrences deciding the final form of the iterations. "KFC notebooks and the UTC" is a complex installation that contains a series of multiples and prints revolving around the Kentucky Fried Chicken fast food chain, specifically a conspiracy theory with Colonel Sanders and the KFC at its centre. The highlight of the piece is the entire menu of KFC cast in lead (i.e. all the burgers, family buckets, etc.).
The second space of the gallery will contain a generator 'The Canonic Combo Casino' a descision centre for an edition of ten seperate installations. By making simple descisions at this centre, the owner will see a piece develop over several years , and although the installations are grounded in the same system the fact that their are over 13,946,241,991,000 combinations enusures radically different results by the time of the works completion.