In London since 2013, Project Native Informant is a commercial art gallery representing 18 artists, collectibles and estates. Each year we produce a number of solo and group exhibitions, talks, concerts and special events and participate in 5 art fairs, including Art Basel, Art Basel Hong Kong, Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze Seoul and Frieze London.
For our complete exhibition and art fair history, please visit our intuitive website -- projectnativeinformant.com
For Frieze Seoul 2024, Project Native Informant (Booth B5) presents new paintings by the celebrated American artist Juliana Huxtable alongside a selection of photographic works from the seminal series DISImages by New York based collective DIS. In addition, the gallery highlights Scottish artist Morag Keil, presenting works for the first time in Asia, including a new wall-based sculpture and selected paintings.
Juliana Huxtable disrupts our understandings of representation. Her celebrated practice - often collapsing painting, photography, text, performance and music - defies the didactic rubrics that attempt to define gender and race. Huxtable re-examines how we perceive 'the image’ or ‘the human’ and signals toward a new subjectivity in mythicised research around the ideas of identity.
In IGUANA GLAM, 2024 - recently presented as part of the large-scale group exhibition Masterful Attention Seekers at MoCA Busan - a drooling amalgamation of the reptilian, bestial and human emerges from a hallucinogenic composition of distorted landscapes. An abstracted leg-like appendage appears in front of the soiled tiles of Manhattan’s subway tunnels. Spines and scattered acidic green scales hover above the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Huxtable’s city-dwelling iguana avatar, rendered in glaring blues and pinks, confronts its audience with the ever-present questions of subcultural identification, gender essentialisms and technological interventions in the natural world.
Morag Keil’s complex practice can be described as self-referential, self-erasing, self-consuming. Working with a purposeful amateurish construction between painting, installation, sculpture and video - often incorporating low-fi technology and recognisable mass-produced objects - her works engage with the human contradictions that make up everyday life.
Staged as a natural history museum diorama The Price of Freedom, 2024, constructs a contemporary allegory. A magician’s rabbit leaping for freedom, flirting with a life outside the hat, only to land back at the start, a performative entrapment. Referencing the morality lessons as seen in the 1978 animation Watership Down, Keil’s work signals to the cyclical human contest between reason and blind emotion, an unending suspension of disbelief. Keil notes ‘it’s a sad narrative, but maybe the bunny had fun while it was in the air.’
The Price of Freedom, akin to Keil’s past works seen in recent presentations at ICA London and Hammer Museum LA, is neither critique nor personal plight against the contemporary condition. Rather, she asks us to contemplate our personal anxiety trimmed thoughts, subjectivity, preconceived interpretations and misconceptions.
Founded in 2010, the NY-based artist collective DIS have continually dismantled dominant aesthetic, societal, political and economic discourses via video, photography and installation. For Frieze Seoul, Project Native Informant presents a selection of works from their iconic series DISImages, 2013. Disrupting the stereotypes often seen in the visual languages of advertising, DISImages confront fantasies of late capitalism and instil new perspectives in neoliberal corporate aesthetics.
‘We’re interested in manipulating the idea of a stock image being ‘a code without a message’ by allowing messages to seep into the equation while still maintaining its status as an image commodity.’ DISImages maintain the recognisable gestures of stock images - smiling at the camera, pointing to household appliances, nondescript studio backdrops - yet the photographs and actions are posed as alternatives, a new genre, to the uncanny homogeneity of commercial imagery. DIS interrogate the ‘texture of the present’ and, with enduring effect, amplify the world around us by manipulating the surfaces of ‘the real’.
DISImages have previously been acquired and exhibited by LACMA, Los Angeles, for the major exhibition Objects of Desire, 2022. The original web-platform and stock image library of DISImages has been archived by Rhizome / New Museum, New York. In 2024, DIS will present their first institutional solo exhibition in Asia, Everything But The World at MoCA Busan.
