“Delusions” Exhibition
ROX Gallery
This event has ended.
Curated by Lauren Xandra, Delusions presents over fifty mixed media artworks spanning a fifty year period (1960s to present). From Warhol to Witkin and their contemporaries, Delusions reveals moments of conceptual and formal resonance between Pop and Surrealist art.
Delusions is a group exhibition featuring artists who locate identity on a spectrum of real to unreal, and in finding outlets in the absurd, reestablish standardized symbols of sensation and selfhood. Delusions centers on both the Pop privileging of appropriation and all-over abstraction, and the Surrealist emphasis on repressed desire and the unconscious–illuminating the irony and cultural disharmony that dominate both movements. The overall effect of the exhibition is an exploration of how bodies of thought and people are often reduced to form.
The artworks on view in the main floor gallery are, as a whole, informed by a symbiosis of idolatry and isolation. In The Hilton Brothers’collaborative series of diptychs entitled Andy Dandy, portraits ofAndy Warhol in drag are juxtaposed alongside photographs of flowers, revealing overexposed subjects encumbered by both banality and costume. Mark Flood’s lace painting, Ceremonial Center, evokes both lifelikeness and loss in its implied motions of reaching and ripping. The accusatory and circular shouts in the etchings of Mel Bochner fall flat once set across from the elusive quiet of Duane Michals’ image sequences. Works by Jordan Doner and Joel-Peter Witkin expose alienated and masked, unusual, made-universal subjects. Witkin is cited for comparing the artist to “the clown before the altar, his ‘prayer,’his art, was to perform”– attesting to the belief that art is about pathos, experience, and changed perspective.
The first room of the downstairs galleries features a solo exhibition of works by artist Holton Rower, and marks the first public display of his Heads series. In his interactive presentation of artifacts, Rower crafts an uncomfortable dichotomy between the original intention of his objects (i.e. a chair made for sitting), and his reclassification and singularizing of them (i.e. his mother’s chair made for sitting saddled with pipe wrenches). Through his process of morphing multiple prosaic parts from curio to specimen and then to art, Rower enables his entire in-situ environment to speak directly from the dislocated realm of generalized ethnography. Within this sphere, his artworks serve as a lens through which different people form concrete images both of one another and of what constitutes value in American culture.
The second room of the downstairs galleries features hand-constructed works by Tom Smith that mimic digital or mechanical output and incorporate a range of vibrant color gradients using spray and acrylic paint. Tom Smith compares the effect of his work to that of a Venetian blind that distorts light within and without. This effect creates an interplay of meaning between that expressed from his inner world and the meaning constructed by the viewer, resulting in “an ongoing experiment and inquiry into our conditioning for recognition, conscious and subconscious.” A collaboration with sound artist, Gryphon Rue, whose sounds collage found and invented sources to veil popular pieces of music, literally amplifies this effect. In testing guests’ associations and recognition, Smith and Rue invoke novel realms of perception.
The last room of the exhibition screens video artwork by William Rahilly, encased by photographs whose content toys with notions of disguise and modern decadence. The exhibition is likely to be felt in the way E.E. Cummings describes a lost soul–“a man falling on all sides,” and aims to serve as a mirror to modernism, glued together by fragmented faces and forms.
Media
Schedule
from September 17, 2013 to October 31, 2013