The superstructure of society and substructures of the mind aggregate into a national psyche and find themselves entwined in a complex construct that defines the form of the human condition. In the United States, the events of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the sub-prime mortgage crisis saw the collapse of the first, shaking the foundations of the second. The 21st century finds the U.S. interrogated not only by external forces, as its status as the world's superpower is questioned, but also internally, by its own citizens, who are fast losing faith in the foundational beliefs on which it was built.

The American Dream—an ethos originally based upon The Declaration of Independence’s reference to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—has perverted itself into an ideology based upon consumerism and materialism (the root of the current economic crises). The Declaration’s promises of possibility, prosperity and success for all have been abstracted to the freedom of choice—then simply into the freedom to choose what one consumes. Lofty ideals have been systematically and ideologically replaced with base greed. Consumption, along with the freedom of choice it affords, proclaims its necessity through branding, marketing and advertising, manifesting itself in media, images, text and slogans. Whether for politics, the abortion debate or a particular brand of blue jeans, advertising has become a signature in the American cultural landscape, influencing choices, which in turn, contribute to the construction of identity and become the lens through which we examine the current state of things. But what is freedom of choice when the economic and cultural system that allowed for it begins to crumble? What happens when there are too many choices, or when choice itself becomes the dilemma? In a country increasingly aware of its own fabrication, the mere act of choosing is a type of “opting in” to consumer culture. Deciding has become less an act of personal liberation and more akin to succumbing to a world of pre-packaged options. Choice itself becomes the rock or the hard place.

By examining the structural system that runs through the valley of American life and illuminating Americas’ ideal of egalitarianism alongside its obsession with identity, artists Scott Kiernan, Osman Khan, Mores McWreath, and BangGeul Han create new paradigms for living in a post-postmodern world. The artists mine their environments for sources that range from New York streets to the Internet and YouTube to create work that tackles what may be an urgent global phenomenon.

Through the use of various media, the artists throw distance between themselves and their viewers. Rather than sticking to pre-inferred ideas or subjective truths, the artists use the lenses of advertising and new technology to construct new formulas, systems or situations to be contemplated. Kiernan’s use of the Lolita name-plated bamboo earring in the installation “Lolita” questions the loss of innocence in contemporary culture, while his piece “Monday Night Madness” explores the neutralization of a popular advertising slogan for football—a mainstream American spectacle.  Khan reconfigures traditional Pakistani truck exterior designs in “Going my way” onto American trucks to question Western cultural hegemony by introducing marginal or exotic design into the U.S. vernacular. His “Untitled (Spray Adhesive)” explores transitory states. In the work, an invisible image or text becomes visible through environmental variables. McWreath and Han explore and examine the connectivity and correspondence between the structure of sentences and of larger narratives, allowing the audience to sit at both ends of a teetering spectrum. In order to construct the “places” in their work, they deconstruct reality, interrogate the world, and replace it with an un-real ‘virtual’ space.

The New York component of 5C5C acts as a platform by which to survey the American contemporary condition and as a place to explore the modality that each artist employs to question cultural, political and personal choices in light of the Ambiguous American future. The right to question, communicate and choose is crucial to individual and national survival and supports the unique personal narratives of the artists. The ambiguity of the United State’s future is reflected in the works presented. The artists do not judge or evoke ultimatums, but create a neutral zone between themselves and their viewers, between actor and spectator, signifier and signified, alienator and the alienated. Thus they unearth both sides of an American system that is simultaneously positive and negative. The New York artists reflect the conditions of an inconclusive time. We are left to figure out what becomes of substructure when the superstructure begins to fail.

Bang Geul Han’s work concerns semiotics full of symbols, alphabets, voices and sounds, only with a twist: destruction of the context. By examining the connectivity and the correspondence between narratives, Han lets the audience sit and experience all perspectives. Seemingly imaginary practices soon reveal paths, in-betweens and portraits of survivors living in the contemporary world.

A context should be something beyond a mere “background,” and physicality plays an important role in the viewers’ vision, which creates understanding. This makes a good parallel with Derrida’s responses to Barthes, the forerunner of Structuralism of the 1970s. Derrida claims that the reality is never rigid or static or just made full of symbols and languages as Structuralists claimed. Rather it keeps changing; therefore there cannot be such transcendental or universal signifiers or elements to decipher with.

The artist’s intention to subvert context is huge. Han sources out textual memories from daily encounters, past conversations, dreams, newspapers, writings, interviews, interactions and performances. She then destructs them piece-by-piece, finally interweaving them with her own storytelling. In the end the process creates a new virtual context, individually picked up and personally arranged by the artist regardless of the outcome.

With an experimental plot plugged into different channels, Han ushers her viewers into unknown spheres. The work becomes new soil where she grows fresh emotions, meanings and possibilities. Multiplicity permeates her fabricated stories in non-linear fashion, shaking off the original context and replacing it with something new.


“Untitled (Guggenheim)”, 2010
A collage work made of video and texts, this piece is typical of Han’s art making. The work begins when she spots two Korean girls outside Guggenheim museum on New York’s Upper East Side. Han starts her surveillance and follows them into the museum.

Throughout the video, stills show the two girls navigating the museum and text in the form of captions overlaps the images. In the text, Han poses and answers questions about herself as an artist and her surroundings, while commenting on her own dialogue. 
The camera distorts the immediate relationship between public space and private place as it follows the girls. The narrative is placed in and out of space and sequence. The boundary between the viewer and the narrator is blurred and merged, shifting from first person narrative to an omniscient style of writing where readers not only listen to what the artist says but also to what she thinks.


”Taaz”, 2010 – present
Are you surviving well? – Oh yes, I am surviving ... rather well...

The word, “survive,” means: “to remain alive.” It is more about remaining through the act of making continuous choices than it is about living. Out of the million things that we may need to stay alive, there is a decisive element— communication. This aspect is so important that its means, styles, and content are paramount.

Han’s ongoing project, “Taaz,” is a communication of her outer world extended to her inner world. She produces wallpaper patterned with small photographs of herself that she digitally manipulates and arranges.

Is there a world real or unreal? Are we placed on one side or in a continuum?
Do we have enough sources to discover the truth, and if so, what would they be?

The name, “Taaz,” comes from Taaz.com, a virtual makeover website based in San Diego. The site allows visitors to change their looks by virtually applying different hairstyles or makeup. Through the site, a person can produces different self-images without actually committing to permanent change. However virtual it might be, the site provides realistic images of the changed individual. Han uses Taaz.com to produce virtual selves. She positions thousands of thumbnail-sized pictures in a Damask pattern, to produce wallpaper.

Wallpaper is limitless in its scope of expansivity; one can expand it on multiple walls or endlessly overlap it in enclaves. The main content, the patterns, are however limited, as a pattern literally is a finite repetitive impression. The vast variety, being repeated, results in a freedom within boundary.

Osman Khan constructs situations that cultivate a pensive confrontation while manufacturing fictional artifacts and surreal documentation. With a polished artifice the work demands austere inspection, but upon puncturing the surface, the artist’s cunning wit reveals the absurd of “the real” used to create tableaus of uncertainty that examine the conditions of a post-postmodern world. Through interactive installations and site-specific interventions, Khan explores certain themes to see the ways in which technology fabricates as well as subverts our understanding of identity, communication, and public space.

Khan’s works manifest in an array of mediums that evoke questions concerning the social, philosophical and economic structures and systems that govern a world of global citizens. Within the local context of the exhibition and the global venues it will visit, Khan’s work evokes a critique of the cost of choice in the free world. In “Net Worth” (2003) viewers are presented with a kiosk with a magnetic card reader that stands in front of a monolithic structure. An image with people’s names at various heights on various colored fields is projected on to the structure. The viewer is encouraged to swipe his or her purchase card (credit, debit or ATM cards) and in doing so, the name contained on the magnetic stripe of their payment card is parsed and googled. Each name is vertically projected onto the monolith with its positioning or ranking representative of the number of hits returned by a google search of the name in relations to the number of hits returned for others.

Names of viewers who swipe their cards are projected along with the names of individuals with higher “Net Worth” including celebrities, politicians, artists, and other famous figures that were pre-fed into the system. The known figures act not only as a litmus test for the visitors, but also as a reflection of our social condition wherein celebrities are “worth” more.

“Net Worth,” one of Khan’s early works, is part of a series of interactive pieces titled “Weapons of Mass Consumption” (2003). The collection includes: “Data Dump,” “Art Dispensing Machine” and “Khan Artist.” Each piece in the series asks viewers to participate by using their credit, debit or ATM cards. The artworks explore identity through Internet usage, spending habits, consumption and credit, questioning the ways in which monetary value and moral or emotional values are determined and fabricated by technology.

“Going my way” (2011), Khan’s first work to reference his native Pakistan, uses imagery from a three month trip to Pakistan. The piece places icons and decorations found on the trucks and buses of Pakistan onto their American counterparts. Rather than transporting goods, the vehicles become mediums of cultural exchange. The interventionist act imparts a different type of global exchange; where the visual vernacular of one culture (arguably a marginalized one) slips into the landscape of the other as trucks crisscross the land, allowing through the distracted gaze, a counter to Western visual hegemony.

“Untitled (Spray Adhesive)” (2011) is a series of works that are created using an invisible spray adhesive fixed on the exhibition wall or floor in the form of a text or image. At the beginning of the exhibition the artwork is almost entirely invisible but as the exhibition progresses and the dust, dirt, lint or gallery “debris” garnered from gallery staff, conditions and/or viewers comes into contact with its sticky surface the text or image begins to appear. In theory, by the end of the exhibition the text or image has become visible.

“Untitled (Spray Adhesive)” evokes questions concerning moments of transparency and environmental effects that shift the invisible to visible; from indeterminacy of personal enlightenment to destructive world catastrophe. In the piece the moment that the text or image becomes legible is similarly unknown, seemingly random and in some instances, the text may never become visible. Still, regardless of the final outcome, the piece’s transformation is inherently based on the infinite (or finite) environmental factors that affect it.

“For whom mourn the passing of monsters” (2010) is a video produced after the artist spent days tying strings around 100 online mail-ordered flies’ necks and documenting their plight. Khan meticulously recorded the flies’ desperate attempts at flight and the subsequent inability for them to do so. Flight, of a bird or animal, is commonly equated with freedom. The allusion the video makes to the fly’s inability to fly freely, subverts the equation evoking both sympathy and empathy. One feels for the fly that cannot get away—stuck yet always hopeful of a forthcoming escape or freedom. “For whom mourn the passing of monsters” may act as a playful metaphor for the absurd and illusionary nature of freedom. In the context of this exhibition, the tied fly becomes emblematic of the world’s naivety, as we imagine freedom is a choice, or that it could ever be found within the tight grip of an all-consuming future.

Scott Kiernan engages in dialogue about advertising, "originality," copyright, and assumptions about the universal qualities of visual language and contemporary art by re-contextualizing found images or objects and creating new situations in which they appear as if they might have been casually "found" by the artist. His painting “Untitled Clip Art (Once around the block (twice))” is from a series of 8’ x 6’ black and white paintings, titled “Untitled Clip Art Series.” The series reactivates the purchasable imagery of pre-Internet advertising clip art to examine its liminal state of incompleteness, the potential for ambiguity when shifted in scale and situation, and the effect of forced detachment on these images from their original intended economic market. The subjects of the series are images appropriated from a found catalogue of royalty-free clip art and stock photos published in the early 1990’s, shortly before the ubiquity of the Internet and the absorption of stock photo business by companies such as Getty Images and Corbis. The images and clip art were intended for use by small businesses (typically without creative teams and in need of cheaper alternatives) to assemble advertisements. For example, the scene from “Untitled Clip Art (Once around the block (twice))” may have appeared in an ad for a local suburban realtor. The images act as the interchangeable parts in the machine of a completed advertisement, but in Kiernan’s work, they are in a way incomplete—lacking the good or service to be sold. The artist uses this very vacancy as a conceptual foil, allowing these visual voids to add to the reading of the work.

Filled with empty spaces and phrases that oscillate between clichéd and ambiguous, the imagery, detached from the product, becomes obtuse. Additionally, by moving content from the clip art catalogue onto the canvas and into the exhibition space, Kiernan creates new spatial and economic meanings.

Kiernan’s site-specific installation, “Lolita,” is made up of a pink spotlight, monofilament, and a gold nameplate hooped earring bearing the name “Lolita,” which he found on a New York City street. The earring hangs from the ceiling with a pink spotlight that magnifies its shadow on an opposite wall—a signal bathed in pink light.

Large gold and silver bamboo patterned nameplate hoop earrings permeated the hip-hop jewelry scene. The “bling” was worn by celebrities and rappers and associated with “street” culture. In the mid 2000’s Carrie Bradshaw, the lead character in the widely popular television series “Sex and the City” began wearing a gold necklace with her first name written with the same script font as the name-plate earrings. The show propelled the trend further into mainstream culture, affirming commercialization through a postmodern condition: conflation between high and low culture. Inherently, the nameplate implies ‘identity,’ but as it is not the artist’s own identity, the name acts as a question regarding a larger societal archetype.

“Lolita” is also the title of the infamous and controversial novel written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1955, where the unreliable narrator, middle-aged Humbert Humbert, becomes obsessed and sexually involved with a 12-year-old girl named Dolores Haze aka “Lolita.” The novel spawned debates over whether the character Lolita was meant to represent an innocent child taken advantage of, or an adult in a child's body who takes advantage of Humbert's obsession to gain things for herself. Despite public outrage after its publication, “Lolita” attained classic status and has become one of the best-known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature in the West. Since the book’s publication, the name "Lolita" has entered popular culture to describe a sexually precocious adolescent girl, and in Kiernan’s installation it is used to suggest the co-existence of contrasting ideas: the loss of innocence and/or the role of agency in deciding whether to hold on to it.

“Monday Night Madness” is a photographic print from an altered found negative of a product shot from a National Football League Monday Night Football VHS tape. Monday Night Football is a live broadcast of NFL games on American TV. Aired since 1970, MNF is one of the longest running prime-time commercial network television series in history, and one of the highest-rated programs—particularly among male viewers. When Kiernan found the MNF VHS product shot, he removed all descriptors that linked it to football or TV (the NFL and CBS logos and some design elements), altering the negative leaving only the text: “Monday Night Madness.” The final image was printed on acetate as a negative and then developed using a traditional darkroom process where multiple exposures of the text and the inversion of colors occurred. The simple alterations to the image give it the new context of "no context," displacing the object and turning it into a product shot for nothing (except, perhaps madness). Kiernan inverts this image of a well-known sports broadcast product into an allusion to the madness of “it all”—perhaps simply televised professional sports if the source is familiar, but something larger if unfamiliar.

Much of Kiernan’s work has been produced or developed under the pseudonym of an organization “Zenith Foundation,” a name given to Kiernan’s ongoing, large-scale collage of multidisciplinary work. The name itself is a duality; a “zenith” can be broadly described as the point directly over your head, so the (Zenith’s) “foundation” would be the observer or audience. However, the two words together also imply an anonymous entity/organization that acts to deliver his missives to the world. In 2010, Kiernan co-founded Louis V.E.S.P, a gallery of sorts that hosts one-night exhibitions in his Brooklyn, NY live/work loft. Louis V.E.S.P’s exhibitions have paired musicians with visual artists creating a cross-pollination of disciplines, resulting in new forms of engagement for local audiences. While demonstrating discipline and loyalty to the creation of art, Kiernan’s pseudonymously named organizations have appropriated titles that act as an extension of his working process and theory.

In early 2011 Louis V.E.S.P., with Kiernan spearheading, began producing E.S.P TV, a regular TV showcase of NYC based artists. Each episode is taped “in front of a live studio audience” with live primitive video effects and a rotating lineup of illustrious hosts. The show is aired on Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a public television station. E.S.P TV appropriates standard structures and content of commercial television and loads it with non-commercial content.

Every system has a structure that runs through the very center of our communication. Ideas are born and die. They change and create things for us to deal and react with. Such endeavors are found here in the works of Mores McWreath. By using different media and experimental methods, the artist builds a gray area, a neutral zone, or a third space, kept apart from either end of reality and perspectives.

McWreath uses digital video, photography and animation among other techniques to explore fragments and elements of daily life ranging from existential revelation through satire, sneezing or even to absolute silence. Seemingly simple sets are in fact meticulously thought out and arranged by McWreath. The short-spanned visuals, sounds, colors, and stances are all effectively managed to satisfy viewers’ commercially tamed appetites.

With Roland Barthes as one of his important influences, McWreath’s approach is reminiscent of Barthes’ “Structural Analysis of Narratives,” wherein Barthes laid out his analysis of narrative in three hierarchical levels: functions, actions and narratives. It is a system where a single descriptive word is used to identify a character, and the character, in turn, creates the action to finally complete the narrative. The video directly connotes “signs,” an important concept of interrogation in Barthes’ semiotics.

While video streams are dissected into several parts, McWreath’s lines of speech resemble short-breathed everyday exclamations; he talks, repeats, whines and resents the commercialized world he might have been thrown into. It is a tactic used to engage in reality and remain alive.

“The Remain”, 2009
Is contemporary consumer culture, disruptive to the discovery of personal identity or is it a pre-requisite for being an individual? Are there such as evil twins in this world?

Doppelgangers are usually understood as ghostly or tangible doubles or look-alikes that represent evil. For William Seward Burroughs, there was “William Lee,” and for Stephen Edwin King, there was Richard Bachman. We all need our counterparts to locate the center of beings.

In “The Remain,” McWreath brings out an alter ego named Will Westlake. Westlake appears suddenly as part of a foreshadowing narrative that comes with the sound of an ominous chime. What we see though, is not only a double, but in fact eight Westlake’s altogether in vivid colors of shirts (in shirts of vivid color). The character(s), all in the same outfit only differentiated by colors, seem civilized and in control like any fellow contemporary Earthians. Self-assured from time to time, they represent themselves confidently as they talk about contemporary consumer world where we live in.

In the background of the scene, boxes are spread and scattered around the room. Though the packages may contain different and colorful products, all are packaged in same gloomy gray color. Ten different sets of scenes are shown, separated from each other by colored dividers. Each scene contains different Westlake(s), each of whom talk, spit, sneeze, warn, satirize, judge, sigh, and go mute. The styles of the characters are direct and assertive with a certain degree of authority, as determined as Samuel Beckett’s quote: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better”.

Each segment shows sincerity, comedy, irony, banality and surrealism. It is as fragmented as Barthes ever dreamed, only shorter, more direct, and visualized. The set, in neutralized gray, provides a zone—albeit a limited one— where different characters meet and gradually lose their distinction. It plays a role as ongoing source of continuum, in which individual ideas of artist are thrown as examples of neutralizing dialogues between artist and viewers.

“The Bud, The Seed, The Egg,” 2008 (3 pieces)
This can’t be real. It looks too far-fetched like the set of marionette performance. It’s disproportionate, silly and theatrical. A person can’t be this big, even on a puppeteer’s set!

“The Bud, The Seed, The Egg” is a 20-minute video, set in a miniature office room with our protagonist Will Westlake, this time, caged. In this claustrophobic setting, with his knees bent and body squeezed, Westlake speaks rather matter-of-factly, makes noises, turns, moves, cries, and shouts in short sequences.

Buds, seeds and eggs refer to the earliest forms of existence; feeble and almost helpless forms of life, they provide a basis for further growth and development. Westlake in his cage is like a fully-grown fetus in a womb.

The colorful actions arise in a form of monologue, narrating his experience of choosing toothpaste out of 75 different types, shouting two words only in repetition with different intonations, and mimicking cries and even snoring. The echoes remain not necessarily targeted to anyone.

As representative of our era, Westlake chooses to free his emotions and acts through limited frames in a limited spatial extension.