From Opening Ceremony New News –
JJJJound at HVW8 Art + Design Gallery
by ALEX BLATT
Since JJJJOUND (the site of random images centered against a white background) was founded in 2006, it has become a necessary browser bookmark for the visually-minded. Beyond the imagery, there isn’t much to the page, except for a lone e-mail link and the quote “It’s a who’s who, what’s what type of livin’.” This, however, is where the site’s beauty lies: founder Justin R. Saunders lets the pictures speak for themselves but he also weaves a story, like a great DJ would mix a vast array of musical styles into a cohesive whole. Whether the images are related to fashion, fine art, pop culture, or Internet memes, they all somehow fit together on JJJJound.Having begun as a series of e-mailed images between Saunders and his longtime friend and creative partner, Claudio Marzano, the site is now the subject of CORRESPONDENCE, an exhibit currently showing at the HVW8 Art + Design Gallery in Los Angeles. For the show, Saunders has taken a batch of the original e-mails and asked commercial artists from the Wushipu oil painting village of Xiamen, China, to reproduce them––headers, tabs, and all––as 4′ x 6′ oil paintings.
One e-mail painting features an image of an outdated desktop computer in between a vintage leather couch and a waxed rain jacket, while another features a beautiful lakeside landscape just above a picture of a boy in a crowd getting hit in the face with a baseball. None of the pictures seem to relate to one another, yet they still come together to produce a unique, mood board-like effect. In a world where the media with which we discover content are always changing, Justin shows how ideas can be shared and trends can be set without the need for large budgets or, in his case, words.
Through July 7, 2013
HVW8 | ART + DESIGN GALLERY
661 N. Spaulding Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
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