Rental Gallery is pleased to present Friend of Ours, a group exhibition organized by Benjamin Godsill and Joel Mesler, on view by appointment from July 4th – July 30th, 2020.

Friend of Ours presents leading contemporary artists who bend reality in such a way as to make the viewer question their own lying eyes. Who even knows what is real anymore? Beyond any pedestrian sense of “fake news”, we drift in an epoch wherein no one seems to agree on any basic premise. Everything we look at is presumed to have always already been face-tuned and photoshopped, and when our brains attempt to decode art objects they are filtered through our presumption that they have been “fixed in post”.

Using a variety of strategies, all of the artists included in Friend of Ours complicate the reading of reality. Many of the artists in the exhibition make objects that seem to have been digitally altered when in fact they are what they are. Others use form and scale to confuse our ability to read what is before our eyes in subtler ways. The line where craft and After Effects meet is blurred and rendered moot. As a whole, the works in the exhibition operate as a new form of trompe-l’oeil, confusing our digitally native brains’ perceptive abilities.‍

Artists included in the exhibition are Farah Al Qasimi, Sayre Gomez, Henry Gunderson, Hugh Hayden, Alex Israel, Matt Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Josh Kline, Fredrick Kunath, Robert Longo, Tony Matelli, Borna Sammak, Mungo Thomson, Austyn Weiner, Jonas Wood, and Anicka Yi.

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A portion of proceeds from the exhibition will be earmarked as a donation to Black Lives Matter and Stony Brook Southampton Hospital’s Healthcare Heroes Fund for COVID-19.

‍To visit Friend of Ours, please make an appointment by contacting the gallery at info@rentalgallery.us or by phone at 631-527-5524.

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ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

Benjamin Godsill is the principle of Curatorial Services, an art advisory firm that assembles world class collections of post-war and contemporary art for a select group of private individuals and family offices.

Joel Mesler is an artist, musician, writer and the proprietor of East Hampton’s Rental Gallery.