23rd April - 19th May 2010

Cake Contemporary Arts is pleased to present Can’t Operate Properly ‘Til Eyes Refocus (COPTER), a solo exhibition by Alan Butler.

Butler’s work challenges the ways in which we experience global culture. Butler makes use of appropriation, remixing cultural artefacts and icons by taking these items that possess specific lineages and combining them with disparate elements to create new ideas and truths. Much of his work is heavily laden with iconoclasms and ubiquitous imagery and artefacts. Cross-referencing, repetition and re-interpretation within the work produce dynamic and evolving meanings.

This solo exhibition of Butler will fill both the main upper gallery space and unrenovated lower gallery at Cake with a large body of interdisciplinary artworks that were created between 2008 and 2010, none of which have been shown in Ireland before. The lower galleries will contain works which contrast greatly with the space, with vibrant handmade graphical landscapes featured throughout the exhibition.

Large-scale ink and adhesive vinyl drawings will feature prominently in the exhibition. For these works, the logos of cultural forces (ranging from ‘Metallica 2’ (2008) to Deepak Chopra’ (2009)) are digitally augmented and transfigured into alternative or farcical versions of the originals. The vinyl logos are fabricated in adhesive and placed in the centre of 200cm x 150cm pieces of paper. Butler then manually highlights the logos, tracing their outlines with brightly coloured inks, leaving the paper entirely covered with reinterpretation after reinterpretation of the original augmented logo’s form. While ultimately the nauseating colours and the laborious handmade process are an attempt to distract from their origins, the bold vinyl logos highlight the impenetrability of these signs.

The dizzying, optical illusionary aesthetic of the drawings is mirrored visually and conceptually through the video works ‘Aggrandize to Downfall’ (2009) and ‘9119’ (2009). The first features appropriated motion picture footage of a space shuttle ‘disaster’, and 3D animated Motion Picture Association of America logos. The logos take the form of debris falling from the wreckage of the space ship, which is suspended in a perpetual looping plummet with no resolve. The video ‘9119’ (2009) is digitally augmented Youtube footage of the second plane hitting the Twin Towers. In ‘9119’, the original document has been carefully, but dramatically manipulated to depict a situation, not as a uniquely closed part of history, but as a looping, recurring and transient event.

In addition to a selection other video and sculptural works, COPTER will also feature three new works created in 2010. An ink/vinyl drawing ‘Spongebob’ is part of the ink/vinyl series, and a new drawing work ‘If you are going to say nothing, say it in rainbows’, is a rendering of a computer-generated colour wheel composed of ‘Lorem Ipsum’ placeholder text (a faux-Latin script used in graphic design to fill areas reserved for text in a preliminary layout). Finally, the absurd video sketch ‘Proposal for a three-minute primetime commercial break’ (lasting 2 min 15 secs).

The exhibition itself takes its name (COPTER) from a suffix to the internet acronym ROFL, ‘ROFLCOPTER’ an absurd, but widely used phrase to express laughter online, which stemmed out of a single event on an online multiplayer game. Although COPTER initially referred to a helicopter, through mimetic evolution, the words ‘Can’t Operate Properly Til Eyes Refocus’ were eventually imposed so that it became an acronym. The title, like the rest of the works in this exhibition interleaves networks and relationships between the mimetic transfer of ideas, art history, socio-political and economic ideologies to create a body of work where specific meanings are redundant. While often humorous, COPTER ultimately aims to suggest that meaning in history and language cannot exist as definite and discreet entities, but are constantly evolving artefacts open to further interpretation, remixing, manipulation and distribution.

Preview: 23rd April 2010 6.30-8.30pm.

Alan Butler's work explores material and philosophical ideas about how imagery and meaning function in technologically mediated realities. His subject often ties together the cultural dogma that underpins visual languages, with algorithmic modes of being in western capitalist societies. He studied at LaSalle College of Arts, Singapore (2009). and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (2004).