Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at REDCAT
Artists: Jay Chung, Q Takeki Maeda
Venue: REDCAT, Los Angeles
Date: July 8 – September 2, 2012
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Gallery at REDCAT, Los Angeles
Press Release:
It’s Saturday’s “S-Class” show jumping championship in Ladeburg, once again
presented by the artist-duo Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda––one an American and
the other Japanese. They have worked together in collaboration for 10 years…
since exactly 2002. They’ve had many international exhibitions in galleries and
museums. In Berlin, they are currently represented by the gallery Isabella
Bortolozzi. And on the occasion of their 10 years of working together, they are
endowing the prize… of the Saturday show jumping championship of 2012.
And if you have a look around the edge of the parcours… to symbolize their 10
years of working together… swaying in the wind of Ladeburg, 4 flags—10 flags,
sorry, 10 flags—in 10 different colors. And maybe have a look, it’s very funny:
horses are shown with very, very different… hats.
On the one hand, this is meant to represent the variety of their ideas, on the other,
the variety of ways that exist to work together with the horse.
–– 12. Reit- und Springturnier, Ladeburg, 2012
REDCAT presents the first major solo exhibition in the United States by Berlin-based artists Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda. Furthering the pairs’ ongoing inquiry into the systems that underlie processes and contexts of social exchange, the exhibition willbe on view in the Gallery at REDCAT Sunday, July 8, 2012 through Sunday, September 2, 2012.
In the months preceding the exhibition at REDCAT, Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda endowed the prize for the “S-Class” show jumping championship in Ladeburg, Germany. Having worked together since 2002, Chung and Maeda’s presentation of the award marked the tenth anniversary of the artists’ collaboration, which began with Modus Tollens (2002), a work that framed their friendship as the basis of their artistic practice. The commemoration of the artists’ ten-year history extends the durational logic of this earlier project and points to their own artistic history as a potential working material. In this instance, the artists use the time that has elapsed over the course of their ongoing relationship as the starting point for a
new artwork.
For the exhibition at REDCAT, Chung and Maeda present the ten flags that discretely framed the event in Ladeburg. Each flag depicts a different drawing of two horses wearing the same hat, accompanied by the words “10 Years of Jay & Q” in an ornate script. The flags take on an unassuming style and manner to render the commemoration of the artists’ career into an understatement, a gesture further reflected by the modest scale of the event in Ladeburg. In addition, a new video produced for the exhibition at REDCAT translates a selection of recent and historical artists’ statements into a choreographed monologue performed by an
actor. Culled together to form a single voice, the statements express an ongoing generational dissatisfaction and disillusionment with younger artists. Brought together in this context, the two projects by Chung and Maeda come to represent the processes by which an artist and artwork are deemed mature, and how a general fear of cultural decline and loss of idealism is inherited from one generation to the next.