Press Release

New York, NY — Munch Gallery is pleased to present Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, a group exhibition featuring new works by Derrick Cruz, Jeremy Dyer, and Luke Kranker.

Taking its title from the 1979 manifesto calling for the control of the masses through social engineering, the exhibition illustrates each artist’s preoccupation with the didactic as a counterbalance to mythopoeia in commercial and political messaging. Their works take the form of minimal plastic objects, stark black-and-white prints, and droning audio compositions created through a range of new and traditional media.

Cruz’s sculptures synthesize physical media formats believed to be obsolete, reflecting on the impact of technological advances on individuation. Inspired by dystopian science fiction, personal physical challenges, and thinkers such as Joseph Campbell and Jaron Lanier, Cruz manipulates religious and humanist aesthetic constructs to produce “an altar for projection and one for self-reflection.”

Dyer’s printed works engage the pastoral landscape as a site of collision. Constructed from original and found photography, his black-and-white images of menacing fires and collapsing beasts strive to reconcile an anachronistic past with what he considers “the inevitable something that is coming.”

Kranker’s sound collages are the byproduct of ten years of psychotropic experimentation and his study of controversial thinkers such as Terence McKenna and Timothy Leary. Inspired by “the darker aspects of the psychedelic experience,” his long-form, textural audio compositions create a space where “thoughts flow freely . . . and self-deception can be observed with sharpened clarity.”