Cirrus Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of RELEASE, Tyler Matthew Oyer’s second solo show with the gallery. The exhibition continues Oyer’s theatrical investigations and critiques of American imperialism, neoliberalism and greed with an installation of paintings, sculptures, apparel, and an original music album.
The exhibition presents Oyer’s highly sought after, iconic black and gold works on paper that are derived from meditations on text and images sourced from song lyrics, film scripts, Bible verse, advertisements, art history, and personal experiences. The painting, “Marquee #59” reproduces Phillip Johnson’s Glass House – minimal to the bone – with a large message across it, saying “Glamourize Your Messes”, while in “Marquee #90”, “Helplessness” is scrawled on what appears to be a contorted Picasso figure. Dating from 2011-2016, these works amass as an uncanny architecture of signifiers and symbols that call names and recite phrases to create a lexicon of desire and destruction. Despite this distopian view, the playful nature of the paintings transcends their cultural anchors to encourage multiple readings of the text and thus inspire personal reflection and narrative.
Oyer’s collaborative album further engages the viewer and the stronghold of meta-narratives of the past, by way of sound and movement. The album, RELEASE, begins its journey with an inquiry into a series of spells that were embedded within the sound waves of a number of popular songs in 1982. These spells were engineered to enter the minds of listeners via their eardrums and dismantle the white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist, and patriarchal pathologies that characterize American domination. The album, RELEASE, harnesses club music in order to conjure, engineer, and cast new spells and prompt movement, participation, and subsequently change. RELEASE will be available through wireless headsets, creating an experiential viewing of the paintings and sculptural elements.
The album will also be available on various platforms, distributed by Practical Records. Musical collaborators include Max Boss, Bendik Giske, Anders Rhedin, Julia Giertz, Kelman Duran, Ingmar Carlson, Lex Brown and Kembra Pfahler.
As with his first exhibition, Shimmy Shake Earthquake, RELEASE considers the body and our senses as an agent for participation and change. While the paintings in the exhibition transfix the viewer by way of image and text, the album utilizes music and myth to entrance and disarm the architects of our current social and political constructs.
Tyler Matthew Oyer (b. 1987, Pennsylvania ) has exhibited and performed extensively throughout the US and Europe . Recent presentations include, Exploring the Nowannago with Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana, CA, and Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; SOPPEN Performance Festival, Oslo, Norway; BOFFO Festival, Fire Island Pines, NY; MoMA PS1, NY; REDCAT, Los Angeles; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany; Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; Kunstnernes Hus Oslo, Oslo, Norway; Bergen Kunstall, Bergen, Norway; and Rogaland Kunstsenter in Stavanger. His work can be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), along with a number of private collections.