High/Low, Rob Lowe explores the numerous ways in which we view, absorb, process, and re-interpret media. High/Low, Rob Lowe is on view at Asia Song Society, 45 Canal St., NY, from Saturday, August 6th to Sunday, August 28th, 2011. Gallery hours are Thursday through Sunday, 12pm to 7pm. There will be an opening reception Saturday, August 6th from 7-9pm at ASS.
The exhibition features Three’s Company: The Drama, an installation premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The Drama strips the beloved 1970’s sitcom of its laugh track and overlays the original footage with a kitschy, sexualized reenactment, thus deconstructing the light-heartedness of daytime television and questioning our easy identification with the drama’s environments and characters. High/Low, Rob Lowe also presents a new video installation featuring previously unseen footage recorded by Franco on iPhone and 8mm film in a fluid stream of environments— from the raw Utah landscape of 127 Hours to university campuses to his frequent car journeys. Displayed on an almost organic structure of 50 monitors, this piece highlights the millennial proclivity for obsessive self-documentation, wherein even the most quotidian moments are performed and instantaneously recontextualized. It raises an unsettling question: in our attempt to preserve and relay even the mundane, are we numbing our experience of life as it unfolds? Or, by performing and continually re-interpreting our small dramas, do we heighten and more fully possess our experience of even the most ephemeral? The exhibition concludes with Road Trip, a new video projection presenting footage from a cross-country road trip during which Franco reads Rob Lowe’s autobiography and visits significant pieces of land art, including Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field. In Road Trip, Franco himself turns 70’s land art into video art, and a movie star’s collected memories of the ‘80s and ‘90s into the memories of an even newer star. High/Low, Rob Lowe is curated by Beatrice Johnson and produced by John Morrow with Associate Producer Alexandra Slattery.
For more info: http://asiasongsociety.com/newsite/