Charlotte Hallberg & Johannes Deyoung

Microwave, May 2012

It’s “sweeps week” all month long at Grizzly Grizzly this May, as televised media color and culture are explored in eye-popping and mind-bending ways. “Microwave”, a two-person exhibition featuring Johannes DeYoung and Charlotte Hallberg, pairs Hallberg’s high-test color installation work with DeYoung’s psychotropic video, emphasizing both artists’ insight into a modern life increasingly experienced on screen.

Charlotte Hallberg paints in response to the increased speed at which we process visual information, and the irreversible influence technology has brought to bear on our experience of light, color, and space. Her one-of-a-kind “printed” paintings, created using rollers and brayers, employ high-speed, pop-up, fluorescing colors drawn from the visual language of on-screen media. Her paintings are installed to completely cover the wall in a grid, the “thumbnail view” translated into space.

Johannes DeYoung’s video works address identity in an increasingly media-based landscape. Using humor as an entry point in the work, DeYoung’s absurd narratives slowly reveal into a confrontation of failure and mortality. In Ego Loser, a claymation mask repeats oddly familiar self-help doctrine while spontaneously (and disconcertingly) sculpting itself, never forming into anything recognizably human for more than a fraction of a second at a time. As DeYoung describes it, “My videos are essentially portraits, exploring shifting identities, cultural affects, and psychological unraveling.” The characters in his videos are broad extensions of himself, occupying dream spaces that reflect, distort and magnify reality.