"She Awoke With A Jerk" Exhibition
Andrea Rosen Gallery (525 W 24th St)
This event has ended.
"She Awoke With A Jerk" is the title of a song by the husband and wife alt-country duo The Handsome Family, from their first album Odessa. The title can be clearly read in two ways – it evokes a woman suddenly jolted awake, the melodrama recalling the style of a suspense novel. At the same time it suggests a woman awaking to find herself in bed with a moron, an idiot, a feckless buffoon. With the force of an epiphany, a woman awakes to the shock that she has somehow been saddled with a jerk.
The duality of this phrase mirrors the theme, tone and identity of this exhibition. The 'Jerk' who confronts the female gaze on awakening is right here – all the artists are male, for a start, the history of which has no shortage of jerks acting up in the name of creativity. In all the works on view in the show, the heritage of the swaggering male artistic genius is ingloriously handed back, in the process twisting the heroism of art making into a doubtful and wretched farce. To cap it all, the works are all loosely within the genre of portraiture; the jerk himself looks out dumbstruck, struggling against the barrage of ambivalence and doubt that the works mobilize at his expense. Through an over-investment in pictorial signature (which in another time would have ultimately expunged the figure and led to abstraction), in these works the "sitter," or "figure" is still stuck in there anyway, lingering like a squatting tenant after the eviction notice has long been served.
Media
Schedule
from May 08, 2010 to June 19, 2010