And/Or Gallery is pleased to announce Jacob Ciocci's debut solo show in Los Angeles. In his videos, paintings, and performances, Ciocci uses pop culture, nostalgia, and branding to explore profound and mundane expressions of freedom, authenticity, suffering, and rage. Although he works across media, his art most often takes the form of collage, with Ciocci combining his own existential questioning and counseling with absurd found footage and other cultural detritus culled from the internet, the trash, or the nearest strip mall of franchised chains. For Ciocci, internet culture is analogous to melancholy in that both constantly flit between meaningless and meaning, between poignancy and banality, between the gleeful and the ghastly. As the artist says, "We don't get the shareable culture we want; we get the shareable culture we deserve."

In Show #28, Ciocci will continue to mine the intersection of consumerism, goofiness, and gloom by drawing on a hodgepodge of cultural symbols and artifacts, including: Planet Fitness gyms, which console their members with the dark promise of a self-care safe space from the "Judgment Zone" of the world; Disney's Eeyore character, who is the poster donkey-boy for plush, socially-acceptable depression; and the recent internet fad of water bottle flip videos, in which kids perform dumb tricks with half-empty water bottles but often simply upload the documentation of their failed and futile attempts. The exhibition will include videos and prints presented in a room-scale installation that further evokes the tragicomedy of adult-onset angst and consumable vulnerability, with many videos screened on phones left unattended to charge in the gallery, which Ciocci imagines as akin to "tiny synthetic people being trapped or stuck awkwardly to a wall, just sitting there without their flesh counterpart."

Jacob Ciocci (b. 1977, Lexington, KY) is an artist and musician who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and North Braddock, PA. He has had solo exhibitions with Foxy Productions and Interstate Gallery in New York and Cooper Cole Gallery in Toronto and has exhibited and performed at a range of venues, including MOMA, the New Museum, and the Tate Britain. With his artist-sister Jessica Ciocci and the animator Ben Jones, he founded the influential artist collective Paper Rad, which produced video art, internet art, paintings, installations, zines, and music that were exhibited at the New Museum, Deitch Projects, and PaceWildenstein. With David Wightman, he creates music and multimedia performances under the name Extreme Animals. His publications include Internet Art (Thames and Hudson, 2004) and two artist's books designed by Paper Rad: BJ and da Dogz and Cartoon Workshop/Pig-Tales (Picture Box Inc). DVD publications include 2 Blessed 2 B Stressed and Music Is a Question With No Answer, both produced by Audio Dregs Recordings and Trash Talking, produced by Load Records. Ciocci holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA from Oberlin College. In 2006, he received a Creative Heights' grant from Heinz Endowments, and he was an Eyebeam fellow from 2010 to 2011. Currently, he is the Visiting Professor of Integrated Media at Oberlin.

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