Our first exhibition of the fall season Stutter presents recent work by Caroline Gray. 

Through digital means Gray continues her practice of making the exhibitions and paintings of other artists the subject of her own work. 

In 2015 Gray completed the piece “Matt” derived from a digital image of an installation of six paintings by Matt Conners at Art Basel in 2012. Gray’s exhibition at Front features this mural-sized painting along with eight new pieces based on digital images of Conner’s work seen on his gallery’s website.

Shown together the paintings conjure the memory of a past exhibition in a distant place, while emphasizing the multi-sensory experience of an actual exhibition in real life. With the presentation of earnest and finely tuned paintings based on digital images, Gray hopes to elicit questions regarding experience, time, reproduction, and authorship. Her work continues the now long history of appropriation employed by artist such as Elaine Sturtevant, Richard Pettibone, Mike Bidlo, and Louise Lawler.

The exhibition will of course spawn more digital images to be shared online, once again obscuring the relationship between objects in a specific place and images of those objects in the no-place of the digital world.

The circulation of images and objects is a metaphor for the elusive nature of truth and trust. Gray likens this to the children’s game of Telephone where a message is whispered from one player to the next.  The constantly recycled  images and objects have multiple lives, and this is the world “Stutter” seeks to explore.