Cody Trepte
Anna Meliksetian and Michael Briggs are pleased to present Remainder, a solo exhibition of new works by Los Angeles based artist Cody Trepte.
In 1953, amateur magician Paul Curry invented a puzzle in which a triangle divided into six segments can be rearranged into a new triangle occupying the same space. The pieces of the original form are cleanly redistributed to produce the new triangle, except that there is the strange result that there are now two extra spaces — two “somethings” from where once there was nothing.
Taking this puzzle as the starting point for the exhibition, Trepte highlights what’s left over as a site of paradox. Remainder consists of photographs, drawings, and a 16mm film. The two large photo-based images, considered drawings by the artist, are made by photographing works on paper of dots, numbers, and arrows. These images simultaneously reference the cellular and the cosmic, maps, movement, and instruction.
The text-based works were hand drawn using bleach over stacks of paper. The bleach soaked through the pages, producing an increasingly muted effect with each layer. The resulting image is one of generation loss — another mark of the remainder.
Smaller drawings are configured into quadrants to create a single image. Like the grid in Curry’s puzzle, these arrangements are unfixed and can be reshuffled to generate new images and new fragments of language.
A large image of a man in a library hangs in the center of the gallery. The figure’s back is turned to the camera as he pulls a book down from shelves of anonymous volumes. Language becomes the record of the remainder as what’s left over is imprinted on the page. The works in the exhibition function like the act of translation. Through transcription, reshuffling, repetition and reproduction, words and images gain and shed meaning as they change from form to form.
Cody Trepte (b. 1983, Austin TX) has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including 2012 edition of Made in LA at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Austin Museum of Art, Texas; Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina, Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Florence, Italy Kunstverein INGAN e.V., Berlin, Thierry Goldberg, New York, and Eleven Rivington, New York. He received his B.F.A. at New York University and his M.F.A. at the California Institute of the Arts in 2010. This is Trepte’s second exhibition with the gallery.
