#1800whooops

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Vinnie Smith & Jen Shear

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Two collaborative works by Vinnie Smith & Jen Shear from “1800 Who Oops”.

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Install shots from Vinnie Smith and Jen Shear’s “1800 Who Oops”.

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Ladybug House is pleased to present individual and collaborative works by Jennifer Shear and Vinnie Smith in “1-800 Who Oops”. Inspired by cultural refuse, both artists use collage and assemblage as medium. Here their work contextualizes printed matter and found objects through random processing, in which chance and freedom play an integral role. In this exhibition, Jennifer and Vinnie both examine the nature of found phenomena in its trivial and unique forms, resulting in moments of clarity and confusion.

“1-800 Who Oops” is a reference to sporadic text found within the artists’ collages. Please join us this Friday, October 30th (MiScHiEf NiGhtT) to view a number of never before seen works. Find clarity or confusion here in California. Happy Halloween!

Jennifer’s collages are clean and formulaic. Her practice is ritual— the grid, so often seen in her collage, is a guide for free association. Through her work, she finds satire in human longing, pain, and desire, in addition to life’s mundane and its minutia. Drawing on themes of alienation within mass consumer culture, her work conveys social deviance and countercultural iconography—  often in juxtaposition with the everyday object. A hedonistic act is often shrugged off with a music note here, or a houseplant there. Such notions indicate a feeling of detachment and ambiguity. In her notable simplicity, Jennifer’s work brings any number of images together, collected from the ephemeral ether, to create a more poignant idea or tone, a sharpened focus.

Vinnie’s xeroxed based collages are meditative interactions in a stream of images, originally sourced from magazines of prior decades or found printed ephemera. Using these media remnants through an analog process often left to chance, heavy rendering, and reduction, he creates a compounded static buzz, a “pause” of makeshift imagery amongst todays enormous, ever evolving digital flow. Perhaps his collages are to be seen as possibilities within a failed transmission or lost communication, bringing into question the grand ubiquity of today’s photo digestion.