"Real Nonfiction" Exhibition
BRIC
This event has ended.
The 3rd Annual Artists from the Registry Exhibition
Curated by Baseera Khan & Jon Lutz
Real Nonfiction brings together work by damali abrams, Becca Albee, Alisa Baremboym, Ben Coonley & Dr. Jonathan Zizmor, Jesse Hamerman, Mike Hein, Tatiana Kronberg, Sheldon Sean Moyer, Carrie Pollack, and Amy Yao. These Brooklyn-based artists express unusually perceptive views of the world around them and an equally insightful articulation of lived experience. Their art practices engage the tangible and intangible ephemera of their daily lives. In this sense, Real Nonfiction asks the viewer to inhabit the artists’ perspectives, forget categorical pre-conceptions, and spend some time looking to this body of work as one looks at a document—observing and absorbing factual information that helps us comprehend reality anew. In grounding this exhibition in the “real” and in “nonfiction,” the issues of truth and authenticity come to the fore. In sum, these artists present a varied picture of twenty-first century reality as we experience it: complex, unquantifiable, and subjective.
All of these artists offer up their own histories and backgrounds as they infuse and reuse popular and consumer culture. Though some artists reveal their sources and documentation in a direct manner, others apply this methodology in an ancillary form. Their works represent a synthesis of things seen, heard, consumed, collected, and absorbed, whether drawn from a television commercial, abstract painting, wall sculpture, or recorded Internet conversation. Overall, Real Nonfiction is dictated by the artists’ perspective and accounts, leaving the spectator with few answers, yet many questions. Ben Coonley & Jonathan Zizmor, Becca Albee, and damali abrams interrogate the boundary between art and its practical uses in the marketplace. Carrie Pollack, Sheldon Sean Moyer, and Mike Hein utilize materials with varied symbolic resonance and recall art historical precedents. Jesse Hamerman, Alisa Baremboym, Tatiana Kronberg, and Amy Yao investigate the signs and symbols of our time.
There are many statements of confidence that belly-up from much of the work in Real Nonfiction. When something new meets something old, without pretension or market pressure, one can begin to look past fixed ideals and begin to see reality in all its forms. Together, the works in this exhibition take an honest look at our material culture, the societies that produce it, and our intense relationships with the objects that literally and figuratively structure our lives. Some of the best artists today don’t obsess over creating something new, but allow art making to take place organically. In this way these artists all demonstrate a serious engagement with the conversation of art. They work among, but do not rely upon, the conceptual seduction of pastiche, ironic nostalgia, and material fetishism. Through personal and sincere explorations, they help to construct a sense of our twenty-first century selves.
— Baseera Fox Khan and Jon Lutz
[Image: Jesse Hamerman "My Signature Works (baywatch)" (2010) Polyurethane plastic, 5 ft x 6 ft x 2 in.]
Media
Schedule
from September 15, 2010 to October 23, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-09-15 from 19:00 to 21:00