01 Mar 2010

Deric Carner at Ping Pong Gallery, San Francisco

San Francisco — In his second solo exhibition with Ping Pong Gallery, Deric Carner presents new poster-style paintings that probe formal and conceptual narratives culled from books, newspapers, urban signage and the internet. The exhibition offers a selection of ink and acrylic works on paper which conjoin abstract signifiers with text fragments referring to ideal or otherwise spectral subjects. The images are familiar in their uncanny modern aesthetic yet frustrate codes of appeal and interpretation. Images such as 'Option #_' replay formal signals of clarity and design while resisting singular meaning.

The 'options' on offer in None of the Above refer to ideas, places, movements and people that are abstracted from their quotidian, medial context. Their forms now function as obliquely suggestive carriers for a message whose intention and origin invite inquiry. The viewer is left to navigate these resonant subjects and specters, constructing the missing ground from an array of over-coded stylings. This journey through a graveyard of derelict ideas arrives at a more considered perspective, proposing narratives with an anti-hierarchical and speculative outlook.

The formal aspect of the hand lettering and off-handed arrangements suggest both obtuse precision and awkward literalism. Things and objects, which are named but not really illustrated in the floating forms, must in the end be looked for outside the plane of representation. The artist has seemingly discounted these options as good solutions or end points, imagining the best choice in deferring to a continually productive present. If not this, then what, the artist suggests with winking irony.

The exhibition is accompanied by an artist's publication featuring an essay by Chris Fitzpatrick.

Deric Carner (b.1975) is currently based in New York City after living in San Francisco, Rotterdam, Paris and points in between. Carner is a graduate of the Piet Zwart Institute in the Netherlands and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has exhibited at Artists Space (2009), Ping Pong Gallery (2008), Geisai Miami (2008), Witte de With Rotterdam (2006), CAC Vilnius (2005), and Kunstverein Malkasten Duesseldorf (2005). His work has been featured in publications by Revolver Books (Frankfurt, 2005-2006); ZYZZYVA (SF, Fall 2008); SUM Magazine (Copenhagen, Spring 2008); and is included in the KIOSK archive at the Kunstbibliothek Berlin (2009). More info at: www.dcarner.com

The artist gratefully acknowledges the support and hospitality of the MacDowell Colony where the majority of this work was created.

For additional information, please contact the gallery at 415.550.7483 or email info@pingponggallery.com.