"Fresh Kills" Exhibition
Dumbo Arts Center
This event has ended.
'Fresh Kills' is the aptly named landfill on Staten Island, resting ground for over fifty years to New York City’s highly orchestrated waste disposal. Due to new environmental regulations in the late 1970’s, the city began to clean the 2,200 acre landfill with the intention of giving it back to the citizens of New York as a usable park after a designated number of years. The landfill was officially closed in March of 2001. A few months later, on September 13, 2001, the Mayor of New York, the NYPD and the FBI announced that it would begin hauling all debris from the freshly destroyed World Trade Center to Fresh Kills. One of the four grass-covered trash mounds would now become the world’s largest crime lab.
I have titled the exhibition Fresh Kills not to be sensational, but to find a parable in the real world for a group of younger artists whose works essentially “fall apart” through their formal, material or conceptual construction. Many of the works included are not discrete objects, but are instead scattered or dropped, disguised or disfigured, and when they are closer to conventional artworks (photography, painting or sculpture), they conjure a sort of “after-ness:” made desperately from physical, conceptual and digital detritus. Many of the works are flaccid or weak emblems that betray their own structure. The artists deal not with pop gestures or cultural critiques, but instead elevate garbage, base material, found imagery and natural materials to a level of intense meaning, much like the abstracted fragments of the World Trade Center.
Curated by David Kennedy Cutler
Media
Schedule
from March 15, 2008 to May 04, 2008