“The View From The Gorge” Exhibition

TSA

[Image: Christine Rebuhn "Overnight Low" Wood, paint, plastic, Playboy magazine, taxidermy bat (2017)]

This event has ended.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York presents The View From The Gorge, curated by Sheherazade (Louisville, KY). The View From the Gorge is a show about the kind of pleasurable wanting that happens between remote spaces and things. The exhibition features new and recent work by three artists—two of whom live in Louisville, Kentucky and one who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Erotic pulses are felt immediately in work by Joel McDonald (Louisville) and Christine Rebuhn (New York). McDonald’s handmade “sex quilt” and bed-ridden sculpture throb with urgency; Rebuhn’s domestic shapes suggest a silent occupant, their see-through parts opening up in an act of hushed exhibitionism. The pulse comes around latently in the drawings of blissed and/or frustrated mechanics by Julie Baldyga (Louisville). The subjects of Baldyga’s drawings, who all resemble her physically, reach out with grubby hands toward vibrating engines and rods.

The remoteness between the objects and subjects in The View From the Gorge also suggests the space that exists culturally and geographically between Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Sheherazade, which is being teleported to Brooklyn from Louisville. The visual geometry of repeated frames that exists in all three artists’ works stands in for the 16-panel glass frames of the Sheherazade garage door, which frames the all of that gallery’s exhibitions in its native space. Taken all together, the grids found in the exhibition represent ideas of voyeurism and distance; the framing of private worlds with the intent to leer, peer, or show. The View From the Gorge wishes you were here.

The View From the Gorge is part of #ArtistRun2020, a year-long exploration of artist-run spaces organized by Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Trestle Gallery.

Sheherazade is a project space located in a one-car garage on an urban street in Louisville, Kentucky, and curated by Julie Leidner (MFA Rhode Island School of Design, 2010). Sheherazade has no open hours, and exhibitions are intended to be viewed from the outside 24 hours a day through the sixteen glass window panes of the garage door. The constantly visible, yet impermeable format intentionally interrupts the boundaries of public and private space in a way that makes outsiders feel like insiders and vice versa. Sheherazade makes it a priority to amplify voices of artists in and outside the Louisville region who have not already had significant exposure, and artists whose work raises questions and challenges the status quo. Site-specific exhibitions in the garage have included actual cars (a Keith Allyn Spencer painted car covering that enveloped a creeping Volkswagen Jetta), an immersive pink laboratory with sounds and smells (by Rodolfo Salgado Jr. in the persona of Dr. Buttzer), and the specially commissioned, large-scale work Which Side Are You On? by West Virginia collective Queer Appalachia, who took a classic Zoe Leonard work of text as a template for tackling the opioid crisis and the Sackler family head on.