Booth 3C22
Project with Roe Ethridge and Cheyney Thompson
For his project at Art Basel Hong Kong, Roe Ethridge presents a new body of photographs that blends his work as a commercial photographer, and artist. Moving between home, travel, work, and leisure, Ethridge adopts new vernaculars as he switches between photographic tropes. While each image first appears as a fragment of a larger narrative, their dissonance gives way to unexpected relationships, and a larger investigation into the mechanics of images and their circulation. Simultaneously generic and intimate, Ethridge’s photographs question their own sincerity, and ultimately the relevance of truth in an oversaturated image culture.
For his project at Art Basel Hong Kong, Cheyney Thompson has developed a new body of work organized around seven typologies of painting, which together form a survey of the last fifteen years of his practice.
These include Thompson’s series of Chronochrome paintings in which time is mapped onto the canvas by coding color to correspond to the hours of the day; three variations of Thompson’s series of Quantity paintings, which constrain the amount of pigment or other material applied in relation to the canvas’ surface area; Stochastic paintings in which a predetermined number of steps generated by a random walk algorithm running inside a color space are recorded on the paintings’ surface in uniform marks. In addition, Thompson has introduced a new series of displacement paintings, where a grid of paint is reorganized through the use of custom tools created by the artist, as well as grayscale paintings of a detail of a work by Peter Paul Rubens.
For the paintings’ display, each set of seven paintings is housed in a storage system designed by Thompson, with only one from each storage device on view at a given time. Custom software, designed to cycle through 823,543 possible arrangements, determines the display for a given moment throughout the duration of the fair.
Broken into seven sets, each containing one of each type, together they represent Thompson’s longstanding interest in the adjacent and integral systems that cohere around artworks. These interests extend to the relationships between the structures or constraints that Thompson imposes on his work and the potential for entropy as artworks are situated in and as fields of information.

mpefm CHINA fair art press release