Robyn Voshardt/Sven Humphrey: SAME BUT INDIFFERENT

February 18 – March 25, 2012

numberthirtyfive gallery is pleased to present a new video installation and photographs by collaborative artists Robyn Voshardt / Sven Humphrey. This is their first solo exhibition at the gallery.

SAME BUT INDIFFERENT embodies the dilemma of holding multiple viewpoints or choices simultaneously while seeking decisive equilibrium. Voshardt/Humphrey propose that indifference be seen as a utopian state of active impartiality, infinite options, and capability to develop in more than one direction, rather than a pejorative describing an apathetic body and mind.

Their large scale video installation, Insert Pause Here, confronts these endless perpetual conundrums through a constantly morphing feedback loop of light and color. The video’s alternating vivid and tertiary hues influence a viewer’s experience in correlation to their current mood, energy level, and capacity for patience. It’s entirely optional to absorb the video over a long duration, or far less at a cursory glance. The alluring weightlessness, tension and mesmerizing pattern comments on our obsessive desire to generate and consume information, images, and materials to the point of saturated exhaustion. Wherever we fall on a curve that plots our fluctuating desires, forever we face the exponential task of making a choice. At what point do images and information slip onto a rapidly downward slope of diminishing marginal utility and eventually collapse into a void?

Voshardt/Humphrey's photographs experiment with similar regenerative concerns and derivative processes across media. Metaphorical edits and cuts appear as bold diagonals and gashes. Colors and patterns are intense and reflective, or densely black. The image origin or reference point from within the artists’ own archive appears deliberately negated or obscured. Some images began as drawings and paintings, others as analog or digital photographs, and settle only temporarily in a fixed, unified surface before being reshuffled into another combination and form. In this process, the action of moving images affects the behavior of a page's edge and its representation in the image. This occurrence places the work somewhere between real and manipulated, sculptural and flat.