LM Projects is pleased to announce its newest invitational; a multiple from Los Angeles based artist Cody Trepte. This project continues Trepte’s interest in language and appropriated imagery yet serves as a precursor to a new body of work that investigates meaning through omission.
Trepte pairs a found silver gelatin photograph with a text based silkscreen to be displayed either as a diptych or in disparate locations within a single space. Unique to the silkscreen is a UV sensitive ink that reveals the phrase So This Is upon direct exposure to sunlight. Absent of light, the print returns to a state of invisibility, or a mere ghost of itself. Over the course of its lifespan (an unknown point in time) the phrase will eventually fix in a gradation of warm tone ink. The photograph is curious and comical with a clown like character at its center bathed in hard sunlight in a nondescript location. Its meaning and provenance remain a mystery. Like the silkscreen, it pulls the viewer in to decipher meaning, a relationship or clue. The works carry a durational quality, slowly revealing new sets of questions or inquiry over time.
Amongst the subtle similarities, the two share the form of an ellipsis – held up high by the costumed character in the photo and in place of the ‘o’ in So This Is. This is a critical gesture for Trepte as he refers to the ellipsis in linguistics as a strategy to question meaning through the omission of content. In linguistics, the ellipsis refers to the deliberate removal of one or more words in a phrase without the phrase losing its meaning (i.e. “Fire when ready” understood as “Fire when you are ready”). Meaning is understood based on context not necessarily on content. For Trepte, this elliptical construction serves as a new vehicle for approaching subject and thinking about how work is understood independently, in relationship to a pair or any given multitude. The viewer is asked to play an active participant in distilling these complexities.