Alan Disparate & Chris Ashley @ David Cunningham Projects

Artists: Chris Ashley and Alan Disparte
Gallery: David Cunningham Projects
Opening Reception: Thursday, August 7, 2008 from 6-9pm
Exhibition Dates: August 7- September 13, 2008
Address: 1928 Folsom Street

Chris Ashley is a painter who began working with HTML in 2000 and since July of 2002 has created and posted a unique drawing to his weblog on a daily basis. Created entirely using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which restricts composition to rows and columns of hard edged solid colored cells the drawings are assembled “by hand” without use of a graphics program or scripting. Working to a daily deadline and with the extreme limitations imposed by the grid of the HTML table Ashley pushes the limits of the medium to produce painterly compositions of great inventiveness, wit and currency. Ashley will exhibit several groupings of these drawings at DCP including a wall sized installation of all 365 drawings created in 2007.

Alan Disparte is a painter who also works in video, installation and sculpture. His work addresses issues of media and culture and is a response to what he perceives as the “subversion of reality in the media of the moment” in it’s promotion of a “mass-manipulated “truth”. A deep yearning for “the authenticity of home” in the face of the blandness of urban sprawl and prevailing pop culture manifests itself in his work as a kind of “manufactured memory”, a warped nostalgia. His recent paintings have a spatial complexity with suspended organic shapes and symmetries found in the natural world and human anatomy creating weightless environments where familiar forms are seen in unfamiliar ways. Disparte lives and works in San Francisco.
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