ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce Lapsed, new works by Benjamin Funke in Gallery Two.

Chicago, IL, November 3, 2012- ANDREW RAFACZ continues the fall 2012 season with Lapsed, new works by Benjamin Funke in Gallery Two. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. It continues through Saturday, December 22, 2012.

Funke investigates the spectacle of contemporary culture, focusing specifically on forms of masculine performance and collective experience while using sculpture, photography, moving images, sound art and performance to inject politicized commentary into his work.

Lapsed presents three new digital vinyl outputs installed as large-scale banners, covering the gallery’s three main walls. The largest piece is a databent image of Andreas Gursky’s photograph 99 Cent. Acquired illegally, the artist has manipulated the raw data of the image to create something wholly new and exclusively digital in nature. It is presented to the exact proportions of the original photograph, printed as a vinyl banner, a somewhat antiquated advertising medium. The other two images in the show are created through the same process, but their original images deal more directly with the artist’s own psychedelic experiences and hypnagogia.

BENJAMIN FUNKE (British, b. 1980) is an image and audio producer living in Indiana. He received his B.F.A. from Columbia College, Chicago in 2005 and his M.F.A. from the University of Notre Dame in 2012. Past exhibitions include ISLANDS IN THE STREAM at Johalla Projects in Chicago; Transient at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Ethnographic Terminalia at the Eastern Bloc for New Media, Montreal, Quebec; Imaginary at the Simutan Association, Timisoara, Romania; New Prints at the International Print Center, New York City, New York.