TRUST, BUT VERIFY

Opening Reception: Sept 4, 6-9pm EST (Artist Talks: Sept 19, 12 noon)

Trust, But Verify presents three monumental projects that address our society’s current grappling with notions of truth, veracity and fact. The exhibition’s triad is structured around past, present, and future. Octavio Abundez’s “A Fake History of Humanity” uses wrong dates, quantities and names to offer the viewer/reader a minimalistic timeline where colonial history, geopolitics, religion, scientific and social progress have been up-ended. Eric Kunsman’s “Fake News” is the artist’s personal approach to documenting our tumultuous political moment through news headlines and screen shots, while creating an archive of the Presidency of Donald J. Trump. Finally, with ‘Big Dada’ Bill Posters and Daniel Howe offer a glimpse of an impending but not so distant time where we are controlled and corrupted by ‘deep fake’ technology, artificial intelligence, and the all important currency of personal data.

Trust, But Verify takes its name from the rhyming Russian proverb: Doveryáy, no proveryáy. The saying became internationally known in English when it was used by President Ronald Reagan on several occasions in geopolitical negotiations and discussions with the Soviet Union.

About the Artists

Eric T. Kunsman (b. Bethlehem, PA) was heavily influenced by the death of the steel industry and its place in American history. The work of Walker Evans compelled him to study photography. Eric had the privilege to study under Lou Draper. Currently, he is a photographer and book artist based in Rochester, NY…

Octavio Abúndez’ (b. Monterrey, Mexico) practice can be divided into three different areas of exploration: the phenomenological, the epistemological and the topological. Each of these theoretic approaches share a common disregard for material narrowness always resulting in an ongoing experimentation that may very well go from classical marble sculptural techniques to photography or everyday objects such as letter boards…

Daniel C. Howe (b. New York, NY) is an artist, writer, musician and computer scientist. His projects— AdNauseam, TrackMeNot, Advertising Positions, The Readers Project, and many others —explore the impact of new technologies on values such as diversity, privacy and freedom. He has been an open-source advocate and contributor to dozens of socially-engaged software projects over the past two decades…

Bill Posters (Barnaby Francis b. Manchester, UK) is an artist-researcher, author and facilitator who is interested in art as research and critical practice. Poster’s works often interrogate persuasion architectures and power relations that exist in public space and online. He works collaboratively across the arts, sciences and advocacy fields on conceptual, sculptural, new media, net art, installation and synthesized video art projects…