NYAB Event - "Unpop" Exhibition

"Unpop" Exhibition

This event has ended.
At A Gathering of the Tribes
Media: Painting, Installation, Video installation

All artists contend with “the market”, both monetary and attention. It often seems the only ideology defining art remains anti-Capitalist antagonism, after pop art created the boundary between commercial and fine art by reversing their flow of influence. Myths that art is a popularity contest are both true and devalue the complex interplay of measures of value.

A Gathering of the Tribes, Unpop’s natal location, as of September 2010, is a nearly broke non-profit, non-commercial, arts organization run out of an old blind guy’s apartment. Its mission of “diversity” is as easily aimed towards unexpected conjunctions of art from the many splintered tribes of art practice, or that fronts at freedom from market constraints, but functions from the popularity of its founder.

In Unpop, we show that spaces peripheral to the art market are all the more market-obsessed. It involves artists who either use pop tropes or engage commodification in entirely different ways. The advertising-inspired aesthetic of high-saturation solid colors, forms simplified to communicate, politicality, and sometimes-sarcastic irrational exuberance, pervade.

Jenny Bhatt combines the cartoon style of Western popism with Hindu Buddhist myth and imagery, featuring a cast of conceptual deities in consumerist narratives. Alex Arcadia is pop art, an elaborate prophetic mythology in which the branding and marketing justifies the objects. Sam Pocker finds moments of dysfunctional absurdity, enforced ignorance, and thoughtless ugliness required by a late capitalist marketplace. Washington Chavez went to every gallery in New York City asking them to look at his paintings, and filmed all of it. Rita Alves’s anamorphic installation paintings of American atrocities question the tension between activism and entertainment. Lauren Hoffen paints interactive commercial editorial parodies. James Mercer assembles ephemeral cardboard and paint installations resembling video game levels.