CES Gallery is pleased to present Analog Watch, a group exhibition featuring works by Christian Maychack, Megan Mueller, Manny Prieres, and Anne Vieux. An analog watch is an example of a retronym. It was coined to distinguish analog watches, which previously had been called watches, from the newer digital set. The name refers to the design of the display, regardless of the timekeeping technology used within the watch.

Manny Prieres at CES Gallery
Imagine two hypothetical lovers. The first might prefer to watch the division of a circle as seconds tick away; the second might choose to count ascending numbers as the day expires. If these âPerfect Loversâ loved each other across a long-distance, say one atop Mount Whitney and the other in Death Valley, time dilation would cause one lover to age ever so slightly faster.
The works in Analog Watch toggle between digital and analog visualizations. The artists employ various technological and hand-crafted systems that collide to reveal errors, glitches, hiccups, gaps in information, incomplete tessellations, and optical illusions. These sudden interruptions in the comfort of a recognizable pattern resonate; they are aesthetically appealing and psychologically affecting.

Megan Mueller at CES Gallery
Christian Maychack uses pigmented epoxy clay and wood to simulate a combative balance between digital-feeling marbling and naturally occurring wood graining. Megan Muellerâs hydro-dipped surfaces feel like stock versions of patterns blistering off of and clinging to objects in an Amazon shopping cart. The acrylic gel transfer registration process offered in Manny Prieresâs paintings feels like the scraped digital ruins of magnetic striped credit. Anne Vieuxâs paintings depict competing notions of digital imagery with backgrounds of chromed laptops melted, torqued, and printed on microfiber with stray InDesign templates painted on top. Time appears to slow down in Vieuxâs paintings like it does for the lover in Death Valley â they visualize cinematic representations of time warping worm-holes while objects from an exploded modernist home fall slowly through the air, psychedelic guitar vibrating in the background. Taking the momentum of Maychack, Mueller, and Preires, Analog Watchpropels through a portal into Vieuxâs room-sized installation.
Analog Watch invites meditations on mechanism and systems, the space-time continuum, and the digital and analog components of human experience. Analog Watch welcomes interruptions of all these things.