Activate: Market Street 5
Till The Break Of Dawn: Blue
Karlos Cárcamo
March 28 – April 18, 2015
85 Market Street, Curated by Jo-el Lopez

Karlos Cárcamo’s work combines his interest in modernist abstraction, art history, and urban culture. Incorporating a process that subverts the formal language of abstraction with a hybrid vocabulary of forms influenced by the constructed nature of urban culture. Cárcamo creates work that samples from past art historical sources as a way of re-contextualizing the codified language of abstract art to address issues that relate to our everyday world.

Till The Break Of Dawn: Blue consists of shaped mono-chromatic paintings with police batons, solarized images of handcuffs on paper, and a sculpture made from Public Enemy vinyl records. All the work in the installation touches on aspects of police violence through a mix of materiality, form, iconography and color.

The installation title is both a slang reference to staying up all through the night and a play on the many meanings of the color blue. As insignia for police, the psychological state of sadness and a reference to art historical uses of the color blue by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, and Yves Klein.

Karlos Cárcamo is a multidisciplinary artist with interests in art history, urban culture, and modernist abstraction. His work often touch on themes related to high and low culture, its influence on art and how the constructed nature of urban culture can be used as a vehicle to understand the world at large. He has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Hunter College, both in New York. He has exhibited extensively including at the Brooklyn Museum; the Bronx Museum of the Arts; MoMA PS1 and Queens Museum of Contemporary Art, both Queens, NY; El Museo del Barrio, Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, and Artists Space, all NY; Jersey City Museum and Aljira Center of Contemporary Art, both NJ; and Museo de Arte de El Salvador. He was awarded a residency at the Lower Eastside Printshop in 2009 and was part of the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace Program in 2000. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, and the Village Voice, among other publications. Karlos Cárcamo is represented by Hionas Gallery in New York. http://www.hionasgallery.com