Primary proudly presents Wheel, a solo exhibition introducing the artist Avery Pack.
Opening May 6th, the exhibit will remain on view through June 10th, 2023.
There is an anxious pleasure in going downhill at high speeds on two spoked rings, much like the unnerving delight of swinging from vines over quicksand and crocodiles – Pitfall! When worlds combine; overlap; impact; or challenge, significant energy is released. Enter the works of Avery Pack and the interplay of these collisions.
Blending a professional life in the bike industry and a past in game design, Avery Pack finds his balance between the pulls of the concrete and the contrived.
No doubt, his physical world is dominated by spinning wheels. And the wheel peeks out and hides in Pack's work as a witness, a bystander, a mechanism of mischief, a reluctant totem, and an occasional stand-in. The wheel presents itself as a fiendish auto-antonym, oscillating between its pure utility and spinning futility; leisure and labor; freedom and collapse; round and round.
And much like constructions of early game worlds, Pack builds and layers a painting with the spirit of that same quasi-architecture in mind, embracing the digital sleight of hand over actual modelling and rendered spaces. His worlds are fraught with the same improvised bag of tricks of early game designers - rotoscoped sprites, parallax landscapes, and outrageous lighting.
In Lap Pool, Pack structures the work like an uncanny Donkey Kong tower, reaching toward ever more brutal trials. This rising form is a classic video game cliché, climbing and narrowing to a space aglow, where more arduous challenges await.
Fashioned like a first-person shooter, in Broken Glass, Pack insinuates a riot or perhaps an attack, where an unassuming shop becomes victimised in a historical commingling. The viewer is positioned as an observer and an accomplice in a grey area where gameplay takes cues from our shared realities.
But nowhere is this more palpable than in Valve, where a quickly rendered wheel hangs partially visible, waiting to release from or unleash further peril, but mostly just begging to be turned.
Opens
Saturday, May 6, 2023
5 PM
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About the Artist :
Avery Pack (b. 1977, New York) spent his professional life in the bicycle industry, with a background in game design and programming. Drawing on these experiences, Pack creates paintings in a loose, figurative language, exploring the interplay between these worlds. Pack received a BA from Columbia University and his bicycle design for a pioneering Silicon Valley transportation program is in the collection of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. He lives and works in Miami, FL.
About Primary :
Primary. (Est. in 2007) is a context & research-driven curatorial collective with a focus on public arts. Located in Little River, Miami, our private residence explores modern ideas on the subject of live/work, connecting new voices in contemporary art with growing audiences & collections.
For further information, please contact info@thisisprimary.com
