“SportCult” Exhibition

“SportCult” Exhibition

Team Gallery

This event has ended.

Team (gallery, inc.) presents a group exhibition entitled SportCult. The show will include work by four artists Jes Fan, Ross Knight, L and Maison Anonyme. The gallery is located at 83 Grand Street in New York, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.

SportCult exists somewhere at the intersection of the pharmaceutic and entertainment fields. Like some kind of medical emergency played for laughs, SportCult focuses on the body; both its prowess and its inherent vice.

Fictions about sports participate in the construction of our ideals of nation, race and class. Sports narratives also traffic in such ineffables as non-sexual love and the adoration of the human body, while mapping out tales of character building and myth-making. Typically, melodramatic tales of victory and defeat strategize an affective call to the spectator’s emotions.
Leisure time is now largely constructed by almost unattainable goals of physical perfection fostered within the rhetoric of health and play. Sports, and their associated imagery, contribute to the conception of gender, sexuality and personal appearance. In addition, sports, through their rigorous structures, also help to define concepts such as cooperation and aggression.
1. Sports as a Source of National Pride: Bodies E(motion)
2. Constructing the Athletic Body
3. Teamwork: Camaraderie & the Sacrifice of the Individual
4. The Commerce of the Human Body, or the Business of Sports & the Sport of Business
Viewed through this lens, a group of four contemporary artists are portrayed as super-athletes, helping to foster a belief in the easy attainment of physical perfection.
Long live the new flesh.

Concurrent with SportCult, Team will also present a solo by Ann Pibal as the second entry in our project room series “Gallery B”. Pibal’s presentation will focus on three recent abstract paintings; their crisp, geometric designs contradicted by the very human manner in which they have been executed.
Further complicating one’s reading of these semi-austere paintings are a grid of works on paper that use surfer magazines as source material. There is a shared luminosity present in the drawings and in the paintings, grounding these surfer dudes in a perpetual magic hour, and allowing the notion of prowess to be easily transcribed from these bronzed icons to painters painting.

Pibal has frequently drawn parallels between the practices of painting and surfing. They are both predominantly solitary pursuits where silence and waiting are as much a part of the “action” as play and work itself. Calm, centered and focussed, Pibal’s paintings also appear built for speed. They remain steadfastly committed to inhabiting the modernist agenda while still reveling in the glories of Zigzag, Sup Magazine, Surfer, Beach Beat, Hyperflex, BIC, Spyder, Formula Energy and Hurley Advantage.

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture

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