'Exposed Icons'
Girardoni's ongoing series of over-painted photos, titled Exposed Icons, expands his exploration of light and material into the arena of photography.
The subject of the photographs is advertising billboards; Girardoni collects images of billboards in urban and rural settings and exposes their hidden,
mostly unseen side, subverting advertising's role as contemporary iconography. He reveals their structure by photo-graphing the billboards from behind,
or documenting them during the transient state when they are blank. The artist first overlays multiple exposures of the same billboard, and then
systematically builds and un-builds each work by digitally deconstructing and physically over-painting the photograph.
These works question the
integrity of the photograph as a carrier of archived information by manipulating their content; image sections are removed, replaced with "digital pigment,"
and juxtaposed to the material paint applied over the photograph. The paint on top of the image — which the artist refers to as "flat sculpture" —
functions in physical space and is in direct dialogue with adjacent, digitally altered information, blurring the boundary between virtual and material content.
By bridging the two, the virtual information of the photograph and the physical structure of the paint are compressed into a single pictorial architecture.
The artist removes and conceals areas of each image, while leaving other parts open, suspending the work in a constant shift between what is perceived as
virtual and what is perceived as real, what is present and what is absent, and what is and is not the subject. The work's center remains undisclosed, engaging
the viewer with the task of completing it.
Johannes Girardoni (born Austria, 1967) is an Austrian - American sculptor, installation and photo-artist known
for immersive work that blurs the line between virtual and material content. His projects regularly lead him to diverse
collaborations with architects, artists, scientists, software engineers, and fabricators.
In 2013, Girardoni completed a
major in-situ permanent work, Metaspace 1 (The Infinite Room), a light and sound sculpture conceived as part of architecture
in collaboration with Cooper Hewitt National Design Award winner Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig Architects.
Girardoni's work has
been widely shown in the US and internationally, including at the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy, the Ludwig Museum, Germany,
the Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA, the California Center for Contemporary Art, and The Austrian Cultural Forum, New York.
Girardoni's Metaspace V2, a groundbreaking interactive sculpture project that brings together art, technology, and science,
was first presented at the exhibition Off and On at Nye+Brown in Los Angeles and appeared in LA Weekly's Five Artsy Things
to Do in L.A.
In 2014 Metaspace V2 was featured at TED2014 in Vancouver BC.
Girardoni has been the subject of features and
reviews both nationally, and internationally, including in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ArtNews, Art in America,
and Sculpture. The artist studied at Bowdoin College, ME and at the M.I.T. Media Lab, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS & INSTALLATION PROJECTS:
2014 2013 2012 2011
Metaspace at TED 2014, Vancouver, BC, Canada 1 Chromasonic Field: Colorimetry, MOAH, Lancaster, CA 1 Johannes Girardoni, PDX Contemporary, Portland, OR 1 Fréquences & Forms, SNAP, Lyon, France 3 Off and On, Nye+Brown, Los Angeles, CA 1 The Infinite Room, WA1 Spectra, SDSU Downtwon Gallery, San Diego, CA1 Neo-Povera, L+M Arts, Venice, CA3 Range, PDX Contemporary, Portland, OR3 Troublesome, Quint Contemporary, San Diego, CA3 Lost-and-Found, Tomlinson Kong Contemporary, New York, NY1 Leven met kunst, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, The Netherlands3 Rebels in Paradise, Nyehaus, Miami, Fl3 Summer 2012, Nye+Brown, Los Angeles, CA3 Light, PDX Contemporary, Portland, OR3 The Armory Show, TKC, New York, NY3 Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Quint Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA3 The (Dis)appearance of Everything, Personal Structures, 54th Biennale di Venezia, Italy1 Light Matters, PDX Contemporary, Portland, Oregon1
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Whitney, Kathleen, Sculpture Magazine, March, 2014 Frank, Peter, "Colorimetry", Artillery Mag, March 4, 2014 Wagley, Catherine, "Five Artsy Things to Do in L.A.", LA Weekly, July 3, 2013 Plagens, Peter, "Lost–and–Found", The Wall Street Journal, March, 2012 Radon, Lisa. "Johannes Girardoni: Light Matters", Art Ltd Magazine, July/August 2011 De Jongh, Karlyn, "Personal Structures - Johannes Girardoni", La Biennale di Venezia, Exhibition Catalog Essay, Venice, 2011 Motley, John, "Johannes Girardoni's Light Matters, at the Junction of Image and Reality" The Oregonian, May 12, 2011 Eva Lake, "Johannes Girardoni" , Visual Art Source, May 2011 Lombardi, John. "Surface-enhanced Raman Spectroscopy of Indanthrone and Flavanthrone", Journal of Raman Spectroscopy, 2009, 40, 1557-1563 Röell, Japp. "Inside-Out and Backwards", Het Financieele Dagblad (Financial Times), The Netherlands, Nov 28, 2009 Genocchio, Benjamin. "In Peekskill, 2 Shows of Raw Works", The New York Times, Sept 26, 2008 Feßler, Anne Katrin. "Duftender Minimalismus", Der Standard, Nov. 11, 2007