Fantastic Realities: New Work by Brian Borlaug & Josh K. Winkler

Opening: August 5th 7p-10p

Fantastic Realities takes a cue from American culture, with a focus on bizarre national monuments and historical political figures.

Fresh off an installation made up of components from the the Reagan Library at Raid Projects in Los Angeles CA, Borlaug will exhibit objects and print installations on the walls and floors of XYandZ that revolve around political history. His work examines the iconographic and the sentimental, the propagandistic and the personal, towards deconstructing various modes of historical representation. The tension between these separate but related approaches is introduced through a juxtaposing of personal family portraits with memorable images and descriptions of political history. From the original photograph, history book page, television still, or Internet reproduction, to the stylized drawing, to the reversed printed image, Borlaug aims to express the dissonance that exists between an event and its documentation.

Winkler's satirical large-scale woodcut prints focus on obscure national monuments that incorporate nature and how humans interact with it. Winkler's images and texts emphasize the growing disconnect between Americans and the earth, the physical shaping of the land by machines, and also the quirky human objects and curiosities of the landscape that highlight our presence on the world's surface. More interested in a creative perspective of a place than the photographic reality, Winkler's drawing with wood gouges facilitates revelation, abstraction, and provides a narrative to the hand of the individual as well as the constantly shifting perspective of a traveler.