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Converge Gallery is excited to present international artist, Juan Arata from Berlin, Germany. His exhibition “Models of Temporal Consciousness,” which opens on Friday, March 4th will feature many works along with a video installation from Juan’s Dirty Realism series that questions the definition of the word art.

What is the unity of a conscious scene? What is the anthropology of awareness? Do we really exist? These are basic questions for Berlin based artist, Juan Arata, who states that we are only memories, even memories from the future. His work shows the fragmentation of consciousness into the sum of past, or future, scenes. The mythology of the self.
His characters, to be shown at Converge Gallery, superpose versions of the Self and suggest the idea of a cubist perception of time.

Juan Arata was born in 1976 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a multimedia artist living in Berlin who works in the fields of installation, video, sculpture, writing and painting. He sometimes performs and acts as curator of self developed projects, which usually involves a networking mode of work or cooperation. He studied Architecture at the University of Buenos Aires, where he later taught art history and project design until he started to work exclusively as an artist in 2003.

His work is most centered in history and its most outstanding makers. This is not because of their merits but for the position they represent in time, as inflector vectors of repetition. Through his artworks, Arata studies the different paradigms which shaped our actual state of mind and its consequent life structure.

Over the past ten years Juan has worked in a variety of media including drawing, installation, video, writing and most prolifically, painting. His figurative paintings feature bold fields of color, both enigmatic and illustrative marks, and the distorted visages and disembodied appendages of his imagined subjects. In the grotesque tradition of George Grosz, Arata describes in paint a cast of motley and gruesome characters caught in the follies of urban life. Though these portraits are developed intuitively, Arata is precise in shaping the uncanny affects of these bizarre and comedic figures, his mark-making and paint application mimetically attuned to the fraught gestures or blank stares of each persona.

For Arata, his consistent use of saccharine and neon colors underscores the web of desire and false expectations that mark the absurdity of the contemporary condition: the asinine pursuit of the bright, shiny, and new. His paintings give further emphasis to the egocentric, repetitive, cyclical worlds of these characters. He also expands upon his interest in repetition and cyclical time, coaxing the uncanny from banal objects and occurrences. Imbued with both humor and sharp critique, Arata’s works are driven by a profound sense of the absurdity of the everyday.

“Models Of Temporal Consciousness” will be on display from March 4th – 26th with an opening reception planned for Friday, March 4th at 6:00 PM.

The gallery is located at 140 West Fourth Street, Williamsport, PA and gallery hours are Monday thru Friday from 9:00 am – 6:00 pm and Saturday from 11:00 am – 6:00 pm. For more information on the gallery, please visit www.convergegallery.com