Artists' Reception: Saturday April 1, 3:00 – 5:00 pm

Jack Fischer Gallery is pleased to present the work of Donna Ruff and Brian Singer in a two-solo show titled Based on a True Story.

Singer’s earlier work has focused around social issues, from homelessness to immigration to the banality and deadliness of texting while driving.

The bulk of Singer’s pieces on view consists of the thread of the flags unraveled, tied end-to-end, and then wrapped around iconic objects such as ladders, coke bottles, champagne glasses and books. The flags have then lost their meaning. The object “flag” ceases to exist, and instead we have a banal coke bottle and other reconfigured objects wrapped, as it were, by a “flag” whose importance has been sundered.

Donna Ruff’s work has also focused on social issues, particularly on how events are transmitted by print-based news sources. Here she has carefully folded and flattened pages of newspapers, photographed them, then cut and reassembled the printed photographs to create abstract forms laden with new meanings. The daily newspaper, holding no significance once it has been read, is transformed into a cluster of shapes and tonal values, but with bits of content that reveal their original source. Some works reproduce photographs at enlarged scale, emphasizing the dot pattern that is used in newspaper reproduction.

We are presented with a determined effort to undermine our preconceived understandings of these objects and what they have become, from the simply sliced media to the undone and rethreaded flags.
 
As Singer states “…while revering the original, the book, the newspaper, content, coke bottle, we add additional meaning to them …history gives way to form and shape.”