Making the Finest Light

Setting the scene, we begin with a cardboard envelope bearing the graffiti alphabet of Guzman’s friend and artistic mentor, José Parla. By juxtaposing the deeply personal quality of wildstyle graffiti writing with the homogenized uniformity of digital communication (texting) implicit in the image of the iPhone, the artist alludes to the humanity lost in the translation as we move from lived experience to virtual reality. Moving right along the arc, we then meet our protagonist: a woman in a red dress, here shown in a loving embrace on the cover of a Sotheby’s auction catalog.

A handwritten Chanel luggage tag follows her image, signaling a voyage. Though penned in French, the tag’s notation bears a New York City address, suggesting both a French departure and American destination. A French web address for APC conveys a leap forward in time, while an advertisement for an exhibition of Alexander Calder’s 1976 works, hypnotically suggests a transatlantic crossing. We then encounter a bootleg Yves St. Laurent ad, picturing rapper “BG” of The Hot Boys and Cash Money Records. With this cheeky American twist on French culture (and additional example of détournement,) Guzman’s incorporation of this trick YSL promotion playfully implies a US arrival. Next, wedged into a flap from a one sheet advertising “Rooms for Rent,” in Spanish (perhaps an allusion to the artist’s native Spanish Harlem), sits an abstractly rendered, grey-haired woman wearing a red dress.

In contrast to the earlier, more youthful rendering of our protagonist, here, at the end of the narrative, Guzman presents her as a warped and obscured loner, behind her, the path of the constellation, in front of her, a massive shining iPhone. As she gazes up at the gleaming device, perhaps she notices how quickly an electrified landscape drowns out the light of the night sky.

For millennia, our ancestors looked up to the cosmos to guide them through the world. In just a few short decades, we have replaced our species’ navigational dependence on astronomy with apps like Uber, Siri, and Google Maps. As we cast our gaze down towards our screens, we absent-mindedly follow the paths illuminated by the glow of our devices, rather than those brightened by the stars above us and transfer control of our collective destiny from nature to technology. Before making our next move, with Making the Finest Light, Guzman asks us to pause, like our protagonist, and ask ourselves where we are really going now, and who, exactly, is directing us there?

Additional information:

The more linear illuminated puncture marks, created with a hatchet, disrupt the picture plane and our gaze, bringing awareness to our digital hypnosis while satirizing the inevitability of a cracked iPhone screen. Atop this advertisement for the iPhone 6, an upside down number seven, and a right side up number 8, speak to the inevitable and exponential development of technology.

Making the Finest Light first exhibited during Guzman’s most recent solo show at the gallery, entitled Détourned (2019). For more on that exhibition, please click here.

MELVIN “GRAVE” GUZMAN

MELVIN (GRAVE) GUZMAN (b. 1989, Harlem, NY) works in photography, performance and monumental mixed-media. While Guzman pursues a range of distinct technical practices, his artwork consistently explores the oscillating relationship between city and self today. The artist often collaborates with fellow cultural revolutionaries like Onyx Collective, Kiki Kudo, Miho Hatori, Kembra Pfahler and the girls of Karen Black. His work has been featured in publications including High Snobiety, Hypebeast, and Whitewall Magazine.

Whether he’s sneakily snapping a photograph, orchestrating an otherworldly theatrical production, or carefully assembling an assortment of luxury advertisements into a sprawling tapestry, Guzman creates images, objects and performances, which explore the relationship between environment and identity in the Digital Age.

Made exclusively from found materials like torn magazine ads, shopping bags, boxes, and posters once discarded by consumer society, his sculptures, costumes, sets and sprawling mixed media works trace the artist’s travels through the world’s urban jungles. Repurposed in his thoughtful constructions, the refuse of contemporary culture invokes our brand lust and sentimentality at once, bringing awareness not only to our material desires, but also - to the inevitably tattered demise of what we consider “valuable” today. Like a fun house mirror, Guzman’s absurdist creations reflect the distorted image of our own false appetites in real time - each a whimsical parody of the irrational fantasies contemporary culture effects on our ideas of beauty, value, truth and relevance.

To experience the products of Guzman’s creativity is to feel the familiar jolt an airplane taking off or the subway heaving to a start and the landscape beginning to rush by, quickly blurring through thick plastic windows as we are cast toward some inevitable destination. Invoking the ennobling quality of time as an aesthetic, his psycho-geographies represent everyday life as it is felt - eliciting the romanticism & idealism, anxiety & depression experienced by a generation bombarded with an ominous, once distant future, ever-rapidly approaching. By transforming the evidence of our agency in the end of the world into narrative abstractions which playfully induce a meditative detachment from our consumerist cravings, the artist attempts to free our minds from the spiritual vacuum of Digital Age media and create the conditions for a lasting future.

“Across a landscape of desire where consumerism constitutes lifestyle and luxury in surfeit subsumes identity, there wanders a creative adventurer named Melvin “Grave” Guzman. A scavenger of our wasteful excess and an interlocutor of those discrete meanings that lay latent within our manic materialism, Guzman is watchful of our wishes and conscious of the cultural subconscious that compels the compulsions of acquisition. He understands the nature of our dream machine and moves through our dreams like an interloper whose interventions are at once a trespass, a theft and a rescue. His art, a tracing of his travels and examination of the traces strewn to the side of our perpetual distraction, is a saving grace, the best thing that can be said about all that is wrong at the moment.” Carlo McCormick, 2019

Artist ig: @grave_