"Context Message" Exhibition
Zach Feuer Gallery
This event has ended.
All of these works have been informally assembled in concert with and in resistance to some of the recent theorizations of contemporary painting, namely those loosely clustered around the semi-recent premise of networked painting. That a gallery plays host to such a notion-to actualize a proposition such as this, to provide an actual site to this virtual para-site, a parasite that is simply looking for a place to eat-a proposition whose communicable lip service has at this point managed to mortar a studio, pay its bills, etch many a practice into textbook careers, could be seen as something of an inevitability. For as long as markets heed opportunity's knocking, there are always suppers to serve, mealtimes that prepare the conditions of its produce as much as it determines its producers, no matter how present or absent they consider themselves to be (something of the world's contemporary sense as an inescapable mosh pit?).
Might it be Gordian bonds spun fractal by the blade of the critical samurai (via #where there is true art, there is honor, no matter the battlefield) networked painting a/k/a theincrowd, or, this tribe will choke if food can on incest, or, does the king/pit boss laughing at the joker constitute a network, or, critique for the sake of branding. In service to such suppers, will the settling of all accounts hinge on a final resort to cannibalism? Or will worlds themselves be cracked open to their core as means of safeguarding these dinners' vitality from the prospect of their becoming-Necromorph? It is in this once-Promethean dead space where all the problematics of inhumanity (communication) slumbers in hermetic despair that cybernetic propositions find contagion like linen finds itself a weave that is comfortable to wear come summer's heat.
This show includes quilts from a particularly rustic area of America (some might even characterize it as "flyover country") which, about 10 years ago, were celebrated for their coincidental relationship to museum-worthy paintings-and not just Rauschenberg's Bed (1955). Notably some were lovingly stitched in memoriam, assembled from the clothing of the deceased into practical bed covers that warmed the poorest of souls. Stripped of their utility in their recent exhibition, might one insist on a radically new orientation, in which the artisanal surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes. Perhaps it is that their psychic address as an image borne of symbolically engorged material expresses a connectivity to an ineluctable beyond ubiquitous to any being exposed to the gift of techné, no matter the poverty. Surely, the inclusion of deeply sutured works such as these reflects the deepening inroads of art into non-art as it continues to alienate the connoisseur with each defection and departure into strange territory, leaving the stand-by criteria to rule an eroding plain.
Media
Schedule
from June 20, 2012 to August 03, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-06-20 from 18:00 to 20:00
Artist(s)
Gene Beery, Mary Lee Bendolph, Merlin Carpenter, David Diao, Tyler Dobson, Michaela Eichwald et al.