…With a Little More Heat, It Could’ve Been a Star.

The group show “…With a Little More Heat, It Could’ve Been a Star” opens at sixteen:one gallery on Saturday, May 31 with a reception from 7 – 10pm. Included in the exhibition are Emilie Halpern, Nick Jones and Marya Alford. The three L.A. based artists play with distance as a romantic theme and as a site for the generation of art. The artists conflation of immeasurable distance, be it the infinite distance to the stars or between our planetary neighbors, speak s about the human distance; the distance between lovers, between signs, and between information. The utilization of inherently low-tech devices to generate a “special effect” about distance is prevalent. How easily can we evoke a distance to speak about a longing for contact?
Projected in a darkened room, Emille Halpern’s Tender is the Night is a piece that evokes the hypnotic wonder of a planetarium. Two dissolving slide projectors are programmed to make stars appear and subtly spell out three lines of a love poem from the surrealist French poet Robert Desnos:

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“I have dreamed so much of you
My arms are used to embracing your shadow
And finding my own chest”.

Once the words have appeared and disappeared the stars continue to swirl and shift in hypnotic psychedelic patterns.
Nick Jones’s Solar System is a 9 screen video installation that plays with how information travels and morphs in relation to the fact, the myth, the theatre and the everyday, all which is triggered by something seemingly simple such as light and color. Nick is interested in the idea of play when it comes to the reading and the misread of signs in these post-structuralist times.