The Medium is the Message
FOG Design + Art
January 15-18, 2015
Booth 306

Luke Butler, Tammy Rae Carland, Hugh Scott-Douglas, Julian Hoeber, Amikam Toren and Ian Wallace.

For FOG Design + Art, Jessica Silverman Gallery presents a group exhibition, exploring the contemporary ramifications of Marshall McLuhan’s influential 1964 expression, “the medium is the message.” Communications media from painting and sculpture to newspapers, film and television are embedded with inextricable meanings related to their physical forms, technological capacities, modes of circulation and potential obsolescence. Works by Amikam Toren and Dashiell Manley investigate the notion of time entailed in daily newspapers, once America’s fastest moving consumer good, now a slow medium on the verge of extinction. Ian Wallace and Luke Butler respectively grapple with the existentialism of film and television while Tammy Rae Carland engages with the old-school objects affiliated with language like manual typewriters, and well-read hardback books. Julian Hoeber’s work harks back to the Renaissance in identifying the window as the prototypical metaphor of pictorial communication whereas Hugh Scott Douglas looks forward, playing with the aesthetics and connotations of digital and analogue images. Together these works by gallery artists investigate the nostalgia of old media and the complex significances that accrue when media are juxtaposed.