Icons, new work by Jim Munn

Frame Shop Gallery
June 6, 2008 – August 9, 2008

How many times a day do you “Google” something, click the “X” to close a program, or wait for the little hourglass on your computer screen? Jim Munn takes these familiar elements of the computer user interface as the subject of his new artwork. These virtual artifacts are so new, and yet already so habitual a part of a computer user’s life, so unobtrusively ingrained, that the idea of the “close button” as fine art is surprising at first. Maybe only a near-death experience could get us to see the rosy red of that close button as if for the first time.

In fact this is exactly what happened to Munn. In 1999, a sudden cerebral hemorrhage sent him into a coma lasting for six months. When he awoke, he was confined to a home until he could convince his doctors that he was fully recovered. While there he continued to draw, forced by circumstances to work small, in graphite. The experience left him with the determination to devote all his energy to art, which until then had been a part time affair. Also, after his illness he began learning to use a computer.

Munn’s stated goal is to do for computer icons what Warhol did for the soup can. His latest work confronts us with something many of us look at every day, but never see. A computer cursor, magnified to over 100 times its usual size, its pixels transformed from individually indistinguishable dots to heavy, imposing blocks; this “icon” becomes truly iconic. Throwing these icons into large scale gives them free play as the metaphors they are.

His drawing Inside is particularly intriguing. The main subject is an enormous “close button;” a white “X” on a rich red ground. The surface has been worked and reworked; Munn even uses sandpaper to modify his surface. In the upper right corner the paper has been worn through, and peeking out from inside this hole is the candy-colored Google logo. He explains that he’s fascinated by the idea that this small box (the computer) seems to contain whole worlds. “Inside the box you can go anywhere.” The “X” could be interpreted as an Algebraic unknown, a variable that could take on any value. When we go inside the box, we step into the unknown.

The exhibit includes mail art featuring Munn’s own artwork printed on stamps via the website stamps.com, as well as drawings, paintings, and sculptures of computer hardware.