Opening on March 3 and running through April 1, we’re showing new work in many media by Boston-based artist Joe Zane, in a show called “Personality.” Please join us on Friday, March 3, from 5-8 pm, to celebrate the opening of this thought-provoking exhibition.

Joe Zane is a conceptual artist of a new stripe, with a great sense of humor that belies the serious intellectual rigor of his work. In this show, Zane presents a cohesive installation that explores many facets of authenticity and authorship in contemporary art making, and looks at how the artist’s persona becomes an object marketed along with the rest of the artwork produced. It includes oil paintings, colored pencil drawings, printed matter, an audio component, and some sculpture, all tightly focused on the topic at hand.
In this exhibition, Zane present several interrelated bodies of work, including a series of paintings inspired by his study of the lives of famous forgers, whose visages have been reproduced in beautiful oil on canvas by anonymous artists working at a mass production paintings house in China. A small wall label identifying the area of expertise of the counterfeiter accompanies each portrait.
Zane has also made a study of Rock Tribute Bands – groups who make a name for themselves by covering already-famous bands – and Zane will be showing his own renderings of albums produced by the tribute bands, with music by these bands available on headphones in the gallery. Also, in a labor intensive undertaking that owes a bit of its bite to the antics of artworld prankster and smarty pants Maurizio Catalan, Zane has produced his own, fake Phaidon Press Monograph in the style of the prestigious publications awarded to artists who have clearly entered the canon, meticulously following the established format down to very clever interviews and essays.

Zane’s work has been included in “Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists” curated by Matthew Higgs, at the ICA, Boston in 2005, in a solo show “Mise en Scene” in Allston Skirt Gallery’s Mini Skirt in 2004, and in “Just Stand There!” curated by Bill Arning, on the Media Test Wall at MIT in 2003.