12/11: STALEMATE // new works by CHRISTOPHER MEERDO

STALEMATE
new works by CHRISTOPHER MEERDO
December 11-25th

Opening Reception: Sunday, December 11, 7-10pm
Open Hours: By Appointment Only

Roxaboxen Exhibitions
2130 w 21st Street, Chicago 60608

STALEMATE
Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema concludes with a great and final cinematic metaphor: an ultimate flash that will end all. Virilio’s notion of corporal distancing between casualty of war and end-user (via technological apparatus) is the impetus behind Christopher Meerdo’s photographic installation Stalemate: a proportionally scaled glow-in-the-dark photographic reproduction of an M1A1 Abrahams tank. Here movie prop simulacra (Denzel Washington’s combat vehicle in Courage Under Fire) lands somewhere between celebratory adolescent bedroom décor and night-vision combat operations. It is at once both a giver and receiver of luminescence, the tank being analogous with the camera obscura.

On view in a darkened room, the image of the tank is not initially visible. Once one’s eyes adjust to the faint glow of the phosphorescent, the tank reveals itself and eventually begins to give the impression of both dimension and volume. Meerdo’s Stalemate implicates the viewer in the slippery relationship between Virilio’s dichotomy of human target and tyrannical vision.

Christopher Meerdo (b.1981) is a Chicago based artist who works primarily in photography, sculpture, and moving image. Meerdo grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and spent time in Lithuania as a teenager. He is a recent recipient of an MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work has been shown in numerous locations including Nottingham, Seattle, Toronto, New York, and Chicago with recent and upcoming exhibitions at Gallery 400, The Hyde Park Art Center, Roxaboxen and Roots & Culture in Chicago. In February 2012 he will be attending the SIM Residency in Reykjavik, Iceland.

More information about Christopher Meerdo can be found at http://christophermeerdo.com/