Emulations

“Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images”

                                                                                                  - Jean Baudrillard

EMULATIONS is a multimedia group exhibition of Southern California-based artists whose work re-examines our relationship to the multidimensional space of the “hyperreal.”

French philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard maintains that reality becomes indistinguishable from fiction when woven with its opposite via a system of substitutions and replacements. It is in this weaving that we find a reality that is purely manufactured by media-driven systems of fantasy and control. The real has been replaced by "hyperreality,” a type of reality that is generated by the endless production of “models of a real without origin or reality.”

The artists in this exhibition focus on different ways in which our society is obsessed with producing and consuming images, where images are themselves coveted substitutes for firsthand experience.

And, why not? No region denotes hyperrealism more than Southern California. From Hollywood to Disneyland, the realities we perceive are made not of one, but of multiple truths, locations and false representations.

Dani Dodge and Brian Thomas Jones explore the myth of Los Angeles versus its reality, Dodge with an installation and Jones in photographs. Ben Jackel, Ed Gomez and Daena Title replicate our world in hyperrealistic style, Jackel in sculpture, Gomez and Title in paint. Ichiro Irie fabricates imitations of reproductions, while Kiel Johnson draws ubiquitous objects and transforms them into imagined realities.

Websites

Durden and Ray: http://www.durdenandray.com/

MuzeuMM: http://www.muzeumm.com/