A magazine is simply a storehouse, whether they be arrows or articles. In the case of dArt International magazine, it would be pictures and words about art. The "dArt Magazine Curated Content” exhibition is restricted to pictures, in this case, pictures used in the way that we might employ words. Wherever possible, in the print dArt, however, the integrity of images as provided by the subject of a given article, has been strictly maintained over the years.

As part of “Curated Content”, the apparent “violation” of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1988 “Riding with Death” reproduction involved separating skeleton and rider from its background and placing it above Edward Ruscha’s “Rimmy Jim’s Chevron” gasoline station photo, now painted with a fire red sky. The Ruscha’s photo was part of his 1963 book “Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations.” The highway in the artist's image is a section Route 66, as they were in the remaining 25 gas stations. The added strip of sand at the bottom of the Steve Rockwell work is from a shot of Granary Lake shoreline in Northern Ontario, Canada. The present "Route 66 Death Rider” imagines a road laid out by Edward Ruscha, the resultant visual fruit of the tension and play between image and word.

The work of the artists featured in the “The dArt Magazine Curated Content” exhibition, have been selected from the store of images that accompanied reviews and surveys of artist production from 1998 to present. No originals were harmed in the process. Abrasive juxtapositions and cuts, it is hoped, taps into the latent potency of a given product, releasing fresh energy for further creative work.

Artist Bio:
Steve Rockwell is primarily known as the publisher of dArt International magazine, released in Los Angeles in January 1998. Initially dArt found its support through LA International Invitational Biennial art fair and other North American art fairs. dArt magazine, however, had roots in art making itself from the start, having been the spinoff of the 1996 book work “Meditations on Space, An Artist’s Odyssey through Art Galleries in Europe and North America. While each gallery visits for the 175 that comprises the book and its sequel had been framed by the artist as “performance,” they conveniently served as grounding for the magazine project that followed. Conceptually informed works also include “The Steve Rockwell Sandwich” and “The dArt Burger.” “Color Match Game” has been played in tournaments across North America. A more recent affirmation of dArt and its art roots are the Curated Content projects, which make use of dArt magazine print pages. Select copies of dArt are mined, not merely, for their image content, but provide the pulp for the frames into which each image is nested.