NYAB Event - Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw “Behold! I teach you the Overman!”

Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw “Behold! I teach you the Overman!”

Postmasters Gallery

This event has ended.

Postmasters presents Behold! I teach you the Overman! by Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw. This will be the artists’ first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw take “the experience economy” to the next level. Going beyond the aesthetical phenomenology of Kusama’s Infinity Room or the basic interaction of the Rain Room, Catron and Outlaw create and manipulate environments engulfing the viewers in the spectacle along the way. Drawing on American culture of extreme excess, their projects involve mechanical automations, video, painting, photography, and performance to create immersive participatory experiences.

Expect a boat ride. Expect the ride to be wild. Expect to be lifted. Expect the unexpected.

In Behold! I teach you the Overman!, Catron and Outlaw create new mythologies to investigate eternal systems of beliefs through a lens of skepticism and humor. The circularity of cultural gluttony, false prophets and their relation to what the society is convinced of as reality is explored via the elaborate set pieces, videos, performance and multimedia paintings. The works aim to physically and metaphorically transport the viewer to higher levels of existence; Catron and Outlaw become the masters of ceremonies, the enablers, the devil’s advocates and the cicerones in a mystery journey as they elevate the audience into the air and have them float through water while being guided through societal, political, and spiritual uncertainty.

Through the use of the banal, absurd and the extreme, Catron and Outlaw construct unforgettable moments in which the participant has no choice but to become a player. As the viewers enter the world of the artists, where concepts of hyper-reality, apprehension and hope battle with Apollonian and Dionysian beliefs, death and life, exaltation and grotesque, the works sift through contradictory realities of the past, present and future.

Paul Outlaw, born and raised in Fairhope, Alabama, and the Southern-Illinoisan Jen, met at Cranbrook Academy of Art outside of Detroit and there began collaborating. The now Brooklyn-based duo have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NY Mag, Vogue, Art in America and online publications such as Paper Mag, Art21, artnet, Blouin Artinfo, Hyperallergic, Art F City, Flavorwire, Gothamist, and Huffington Post. They also have been featured on Chopped and Eat Street TV of the Food Network.