621 Gallery Presents:
a duo exhibition by Jonathan McFadden & David Wischer
Gone Phishing by David Wischer
Artist Bio | David Wischer
David Wischer was born in Henderson, Kentucky. He received his B.F.A. in Graphic Design from Northern Kentucky University and his M.F.A. in Fine Art from Purdue University. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital and Print Media at University of Kentucky. His work has been exhibited at the Center for Book Arts in New York, the Four Rivers Print Biennial at Southern Illinois University, and International Print Center New York.
Artist Statement
My work is heavily influenced by my personal daily observations of The Absurd. Social media, the internet, television, current events, digital communication and technology are a constant source of inspiration for me. As humans, we deal with money problems, noisy neighbors, unruly pets and all of the other things that make up our hectic and unpredictable daily lives. I use the senselessness of daily life as a foundation for a humorous dialogue with the viewer. Through my use of printmaking, animation, installation, collage, and digital art, I meld topical humor, social commentary, nostalgia, and parody in my work, which functions as an inside joke for a generation of adults who grew up absorbing their knowledge through television and the internet.
Much of my work is built around appropriated images which may be familiar to the viewer. This recognition becomes the set-up to my visual punch line. The laws of visual art are much like the laws of literature. Through our own experiences in life, we are trained to understand certain conventional constructions of images. The changes I make in imagery propel the absurdity of the original subject into the area of nonsense by breaching those syntactic rules, surprising and amusing the viewer. One might find the images I create to be preposterous, but they are firmly planted in realities drawn from incongruous sources. And with this syntactical rupture, a new exaggerated reality is formed and the viewer can now reflect on the absurdity of the original situation.
For more information on the artists work, please visit his website: www.davidwischer.com
Winner Winner by Jonathan McFadden
Jonathan McFadden | Artist Statement
My Print and Installation work interacts with, interprets, and processes fragments of personal narratives of the people we have loose associations with while finding ourselves as voyeurs in these personal moments. While these digital images appear in our social feeds temporarily, they have a permanence and history that exists beyond the brief moment we view them on our devices. By utilizing this information for object creation, the ephemeral take on a static permanence alters how the information is consumed and allows the viewer to engage in new dialogues with the work. This ephemeral form of narrative gets woven and intertwined in the imagery, text, and objects used in my work. I seek connections between the objects and information that allow for the print and object based work to become linked in site-specific installations that balance the ephemeral with the presence of an ongoing history. Additionally, my work is inspired by post-capitalist and hyper-capitalist economic structures. I find inspiration for my print and installation work in the writings of Jonathan Crary. In his books Crary discusses the impact of globalized capitalist systems and their impact on our interaction with the culture and aesthetic world that 24/7 access to material goods and the system of marketed surveillance of manufactured goods.
For more information on the artists work, please visit his website: www.jonathanmcfadden.com