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Past Exhibition

davestein

David Stein

Today, I want to Tell you about

From: October 23, 2010 - November 20, 2010
Artists' Reception: Saturday October 23, 6-8pm

Proof Gallery is pleased to present the Boston solo debut of Brooklyn-based artist David Stein.
The video works that comprise Today I want to tell you about, rely on absurdist strategies to question the quality, content and even materiality of the information we receive in the mainstream and social media. Obsessed with that which depresses him: the output our consumer society in the form of advertising, plastic objects biding their time between being made and becoming landfill, fashion and amateur political commentary, Stein translates these cultural relics into a final form which highlights their transitory meaning. A continued preoccupation with printed matter, word play and humorous inversion informs Stein's ouevre.

Exactly as the title suggests, Reading the New York Times Through a Straw is video shot entirely through a straw. We slowly, painfully pan across the front page of the New York Times reading the paper bit by bit. The Magazine Films were made by (digitally) feeding printed magazines (Elle, Guns and Ammo, Thrasher, People) into a 35mm projector. Each page is cut into a strip, connected end to end, and run in sequence. What you see in every frame is a 20mm by 35mm slice of the page for 1/24th of a second, giving a kaleidoscopic version of the magazine which compresses a 3-D object made up of 2-D images into a four dimensional space. Top-Five Must-Have are mash-ups of YouTube makeup reviews and Arizona immigration policy debaters. Intercutting the videos allows Stein to contrast their topics, tease out their similarities, and weave conversation out of people who exist in distinct physical, political cultural, and epistemological spaces.

David Stein has been awarded residencies at the Bemis Center for the Arts and The McDowell Colony. His work has been reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle and been the Critic's Pick on Artforum.com. He has received the Murphy Fellowship and the California College of the Arts All College Honors award. David Stein's work has appeared in group shows at the Berkeley Art Museum, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, the Bedford Gallery, Queens Nails Projects, the Richard L. Nelson Gallery, New Langton Arts, the Rooseum, and the Kunsthaus Dresden, and solo shows at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, and the Verge Center for the Arts.