From March 12th to March 28th, long time Behance member and superb visual artist, Chad Wys, will be exhibiting his show “File Not Found” at the Joseph Gross Gallery in New York City. Chad’s work combines various forms of classic art forms like painting and sculpture but with a digital era twist.  Chad writes:

“I often think about how we receive the visual information around us, how casually data is exchanged, and how little we tend to pay attention to what we see. The notion of a ‘file’ not being found, or not being accessible, stops us in our tracks and suddenly we desire to see what we’re not able to see. In other words, we’d probably ignore the information if it was presented to us normally, but since it’s not being presented to us, or since it’s not deliverable, our curiosity is stimulated and we suddenly wish to see it, if only to ignore it once again thereafter. I think this applies to the world at large, and certainly to my work, where I often remove data from the audience’s view. We desire and want data until we receive it. We only consider more deeply data that we don’t understand, and we take for granted the data we think we already know,”

 

 

Chad’s challenge to the viewer is no mistake.  With a Master’s Degree in Visual Culture, “a discipline with a multi-pronged emphasis on art history, visual theory, and philosophy,” he as wealth of knowledge in both classic and contemporary art, two movements that are often at odds with one another.  Impressionists were his idols growing up, but it wasn’t until later that he “developed enthusiasm for contemporary art, where once I had harbored little patience and more than a small amount of resentment. Like many, I feared that which I did not possess the intellectual framework to understand.”

Like many Post-Modern artists before him, Chad works with found art or readymades.  ”Ultimately, it is through appropriation that I’ve found the most direct line to the problems that concern me above others. Sourcing, displaying, and adapting materials from my urban environment has become both my process and my methodology for dealing with the culture, and the cultural information, I wish to critique.”