Juxtapoz Magazine – These Five Kings: Ravi Zupa @ Subliminal Projects, Los Angeles

Subliminal Projects is happy to current These 5 Kings, by Denver-based artist Ravi Zupa. For his second solo exhibition at Subliminal Tasks, Zupa will make the most of everything of the gallery presenting 4 totally different our bodies of labor that spotlight his multidisciplinary observe. The exhibition will function a site-specific set up of his ongoing typewriter machine gun sequence titled “Mightier Than,” a brand new sequence of sculptures, in addition to new print-based originals, drawings, and work.

The exhibition title, “These 5 Kings,” was lifted from a line within the poem “The Hand That Signed the Paper,” by Dylan Thomas, printed in 1935. The poem examines the risks of energy and the written phrase, an idea that performs an integral function within the exhibition by way of a up to date lens. With the arrival of A.I. language fashions, the autonomy of extra cognitive duties, akin to writing, has now been usurped, and our aggressive benefit is now contingent on our empathy and dexterity.

“Our arms are solely made extra valuable and extra invaluable by this unusual flip of historical past,” Zupa says. “We often consider the ability of phrases as a constructive factor, the way it beats the ability of violence, however this poem keenly illustrates the harmful aspect of that energy. How the written phrase is usually a weapon of mass destruction. What we make with our arms and who we share it with turns into extra lovely and extra profound.” 

This poem particularly resonates with Zupa’s “Mightier Than” sequence. With intricate craftsmanship, Zupa creates real looking wanting fashionable assault rifles out of classic typewriter elements, turning the adage the “pen is mightier than the sword” on its head. Totally self-taught, Zupa sources his materials solely from his personal hand and inventive universe, using quite a lot of inventive strategies and in depth analysis. Discovering inspiration from German Renaissance printmakers, Flemish primitives, summary expressionists, Japanese woodblock artists, Mughal painters, spiritual iconography, and revolutionary propaganda from around the globe, Zupa has created his personal distinctive symbolic legend. The immersive exhibition takes the viewer by way of Zupa’s singular retrofuturistic aesthetic, difficult concepts of violence and communication, cultural familiarities, and the fantastical.