Chris Lipomi and Jason Sherry

Chris Lipomi’s new works on paper continue his exploration of art’s double role as an agent of aesthetic and cultural valuation, and as a site for social interaction and integration.  In 16 unique small-scale “drawings” created over the past two years, Lipomi combines photography—and, specifically found images from magazines and the internet—with images of railroad tie sculptures that he has created, alternately scanning and printing them onto other existing images or hotel stationery.  He also adds his own drawing and painting—very often of these same railroad tie sculptures. The solid quasi-figurative / geometric pictograms of these sculptures maintain a sense of the familiar yet reflect a void.  Their blackened out shapes are both placed on top of the imagery and are also simultaneously removed from it.  By contextualizing his own “ready-made” sculptures, adding or subtracting their presence within his own works, Lipomi historicizes himself—with humor and irreverence—into a tradition of evolutionary criticism.  Critic Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer has remarked that Lipomi's reference-rich practice “continually reinforces a belief that history has always already happened—or, put in other terms, that any proposed beginning is also a middle or end contextualized according to another vantage.”