12 Oct 2008

Christoph Draeger at Roebling Hall New York

Roebling Hall is pleased to announce 'The End of the Remake', Christoph Draeger's 4th solo exhibition at the gallery. Draeger's long-term fascination with society's concern for disaster is again central to his current exhibition. 'The End of the Remake' specifically explores this deep fascination by looking to iconic artistic giants Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Hitchcock and Michelangelo Antonioni and reinterpreting them, underscoring the impending doom inherent in their works that he identifies with. Draeger utilizes this aspect of their works and remakes or remixes them to attach them more closely to his notion of how pop culture, modernism, science, politics and technical advancement lead to alienation, societal dread and disengagement.

In a reconstruction of Duchamp's 'Large Glass' and a deconstructed puzzle work depicting the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, he implies that the advancements of modernism and technology paradoxically work simultaneously as coping mechanisms and twin propellers of breakage in society. Abstracted analysis in art and science have built a complex societal edifice too arcane and potentially too dreadful to contemplate directly, resulting in escapism from helplessness through disengagement, lurid entertainment, games, and the further deconstruction of philosophy.

In the smaller gallery, Draeger builds a psychedelic hippie dungeon containing the three videos of his new trilogy 'The End of the Remake Part 1-3' (2006-2008). In 'Hippie Movie', the Summer of Love is re-enacted by a hippie movement he created one year ago in Warsaw, 40 years too late: a utopic re-creation of total escape now lost to us.

Christoph Draeger's portents of doom have had a chilling simultaneity with events over the years. His video 'Crash' concerned with airplane crashes intermittently caught live by amateur video and Hollywood extravaganza was pulled from an exhibition at the Palm Beach ICA on September 11, 2001, while his show 'If You Lived here You would Be Dead Now' (an installation featuring a burned-out camping trailer), opened at Roebling Hall in Brooklyn on Sep 20th of the same year. Current events renew this sense of dread and awe of disasters beyond our control.

Draeger was born in Zurich and attended the School of Visual Arts, Luzern and Ecole Nat. Superior des Arts Visul de la Cambre, Brussels. He now lives and works in New York.