For their Los Angeles debut at LAXART, New York-based collaborators Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker will produce a series of site-specific silk screened wall paintings as well as a public billboard project on La Cienega Boulevard under their collaboration Guyton\Walker. By appropriating a seemingly random variety of images, some pertaining strongly to consumerism and mass media, others only tangentially, and running them through the technological mill, Guyton\Walker manipulates chosen iconography to take on new, altered and resonant meanings. With techniques ranging from digitally scanning and altering images, forcing canvas through inkjet printers and photo silk-screening, the artists' innovative use of new technology updates art historical pop cultural co-option. The artists arrange canvases, 250 one-gallon paint cans, and protruding wall flags among coconuts and light bulbs, creating a multi-level discussion about advertisement, art and technology. The dirty, altered images, however, reclaimed decisively by the artists' physical touch, adds another layer of commentary on how technology can be used to subvert the power of branding through personalization. With this project, Guyton\Walker will extend these methods of expropriation and technological reproduction through a manipulation of the surfaces of the exhibition space. Guyton and Walker resume their collaboration after a two-year hiatus.

Wade Guyton's larger practice attempts to mediate painting, photography and sculpture, examining the intercession and conversion between the mediums. His notorious corpus of drawings ranges from black manual drafts, markings on found material, torn pages from design, home and sculpture publications, largely from the '60s and '70s - a site of obsessive intervention for Guyton. Kelley Walker has collected branding images from advertisements, digitally altered them and simultaneously unified and degraded them by covering them in chocolate and other foodstuffs. The artists' newest collaboration takes on propagandist logic and the language of advertising with art historical repercussions. Both Guyton and Walker are interested in the bad word appropriation as well as highly mediated and secondary output. Images are subject to perpetual alteration, replication and dispersal.

Guyton\Walker's exhibitions include Empire Strikes Back, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University (2006), The Failever of Judgement Part III, Greene Naftali Gallery, New York (2005), and The Failever of Judgement, Rheinschau Cologne Art Projects, Cologne (2004). Notable group exhibitions include Bring the War Home, QED Gallery, Los Angeles, An Ongoing Low-grade Mystery, Paula Cooper, New York, and Uncertain States of America, Reykjavik Art Museum (all 2006).