Clark & Faria is pleased to present a group show featuring work by Karin Bubas, Douglas Coupland, Graham Gillmore and Derek Liddington.

Inspired by the developing duality of self-image and persona in today’s culture, Reality Check is a composite of different artists’ approach toward the question of authenticity and the blurring of boundaries between what is real, what is fake and what is represented.  Today, mass visual culture cannot avoid being an amalgamation of these states, and artists in this show explore this limitless hybrid condition.

Karin Bubas will feature a selection of work from her series of character stills taken from popular reality television show The Hills. Removed from their context, Bubas focuses on the individual outside of their celebrity and the scripted events that are presented to the viewer as reality. Douglas Coupland, in his own fascination with pervasive technological influence on our daily lives, pairs glamour shots of 1950’s Japanese film stars with the calibration patterns used in television to suggest this patterning as a still-relevant means for navigating imagery in the digital realm. Graham Gillmore plays with the sincerity of words in a large-scale diptych taken from the sensationalized world of Evangelicalism and the promise of an imagined reality based on false assurances by a corrupt man of God. Meanwhile, Derek Liddington’s set of double self-portraits propose a fictional arm wrestle between the artist and “dandy-macho conceptualists” Chris Burden and Bruce Nauman alongside two views of a working class flâneur after the work of Douglas Gordan and Tim Lee.  Reworking and inserting himself into their earlier Modernist visions of masculinity, conflict, and social standing, Liddington wrestles with his artist self and its historical foundation and future potential.

Works featured in this show connect to the role of performance in the everyday and the limits of control over what is projected.  Fakery abounds, and the role of the viewer as both participant and enabler is turned inside out, destabilizing any sense of what is concrete.