JOHN DENNISTON

Crash Site

May 28th - July 10th 2022

 The Safe Room Project, powered by Swivel Saugerties is pleased to present its inaugural solo exhibition, Crash Site by John Denniston opening Saturday, May 28th, 2022 at 258 Main Street, Saugerties, New York. The exhibition brings together a suite of Denniston’s new paintings which explore a distinct and extremely potent zoomer point of view which has procured out of lived experience. The six featured paintings directly reference a strange occurrence and philosophical notion that came to be via his instagram algorithm, which at a point began to bombard the artist with countless looping videos of car crashes. After examining these dashcam catastrophes at length, Denniston noticed a pattern…the only time he watched peaceful traffic was moments before the crash, therefore once the loop was in play peace became only a precursor to the crash site.

Once this pattern becomes learned, it changes our view of peaceful traffic into a spectacle of anticipation, placing unordinary tension on normal traffic, which is in turn only released with the crash itself. With this repeated state of affairs, it flattens our understanding of cause and effect within the video; both events happen before and after each other separated only by an abrupt frame jump after the crash. Denniston then investigated this surreal experience further, whereupon he noticed this shift not only here but in contemporary media. Specifically that of movie trailers who he ascertained have traded in cliffhangers and teasers for abridged versions of the entire movie, at times even spoiling the ending. The point is no longer to suspend your anticipation, but explain how you’re about to spend two hours, arranging a contractual agreement with your time. The big reveal of these conditioned situations is not the change in the way we experience video, but a change in the “consumer’s power of imagination”. 

Crash Site is a direct commentary on the feeling of disbelief once felt from the news or experience of catastrophes, a feeling which has all but evaporated in contemporary society and in some cases has been replaced in our senses by brooding anticipation. Denniston stretches the word “crash” to its limits, referring not only to these occurrences, but also the imploding structures of painting and systemic practices of the modern era. His paintings depict a defiant, stationary moment within a crash, as if painting the scene rebels against the infinite loop of cause and effect, a moment that forces you to watch our dazzling catastrophe. Yannis Varofoukis, former Greek minister of finance, popularized the term techno-feudalism to describe a pending economic crash caused by Zuckerbergian dystopias and the labor of social media consumers. The irony of techno-feudalism in the U.S. is its coexistence with commodities.

Denniston’s position does not interpret our consumerism and commodity surplus as evidence against our direction towards a new form of feudalism, but as an uncanny compensation for a symptom of a genuine crash. One that is adorned with cappuccinos and Met Gala fashions. The paintings create an aesthetic response to this broken sense of cause and effect where playful color and comical drawings give a satirically sweet flavor to these eerie, dark moments. A place where jerky distortions in the picture function like frame jumps in a video, however in the paintings these abruptions remain everlasting and trap the eyes in painterly conundrums. The end results deliver the way paint can crash into itself, focusing one’s attention on the crash rather than on its cause or effect. The paintings in Crash Site begin to understand the presence of this uncanny, almost contradictory space that exists within scenes which foreshadow a possibly doomed fate within us all.