Kevin Zucker

LFL Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Kevin Zucker's paintings.

Since cavemen first squabbled over shadows, people have been preoccupied with ideals, with abstractions and generalizations. It often seems that for every thing present in our physical world- for every single situation, piece of furniture, backdrop for interaction- there exists a corresponding technical drawing, a plan, logged and captured somewhere, Saved As.

Amidst all the talk about the ability of these maps to get things uncannily right and to insinuate themselves into reality, whatís often glossed over are the distortions and degradations that happen in the process of translating increasingly particular things into ideas/ images, then back into objects and over again. There's a lot of static in these processes, interference, and lots of details get, if not always lost, then skewed, even in our very highest-res translations.

There's something about the fact of all these tweaked archetypes out there imposing themselves on physical reality that has a serious impact on our emotional lives, inner and interpersonal, and the effect runs somewhere along the lines that weíre increasingly able to relate only in terms of conventions for representing emotions.

Or: is there a similarity between perspective drawing (blatant convention of representation, complete with limitations, but appeals totally to the lowest common denominator of legibility) and a laugh track (L.C.D. of legibility as regards an emotional state)?

This is nothing entirely new, is part of a process, and is not even necessarily bad. What we've got right now happens to be very, very funny; very, very sad, and very boring: alternately, all at once.

People who can remember Pong relate themselves to digital representation in some interesting ways. Old enough to be able to trace the whole history of that set of conventions, and so therefore maybe not so perfectly accepting, but young enough to be able to relate to the spaces in Tomb Raider in a serious, unselfconscious way; to be able to project ourselves: overlook the technology enough of the time.

So: what's it like when our mirror-world of generalities and archetypes becomes literally encyclopedic? Do the representations continue to suffer some measure of human distortion, though repressed to whatever extent possible by the tools at the draftsmanís disposal? Do they bear the marks of repeated idea-image-object translations? How clear are the limitations of those tools in describing the expressive potential of everyday spaces and situations? What if there was an ideal twelve-step meeting, or Princess bedroom set?

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Kevin Zucker