"Nobody Sees the Wizard. Not Nobody. Not Nohow." Exhibition

Kustera Projects Red Hook

poster for "Nobody Sees the Wizard. Not Nobody. Not Nohow." Exhibition

This event has ended.

Admittedly, OZ is intoxicating and wonderful, but for a kid it can be devastating. The land is colorful and also cruel, and the grown-ups she meets are sincere but fatally flawed. As Salman Rushdie points out in his 1997 essay, The Wizard of Oz: An Appreciation, the film’s “driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults…” For the tweenage Midwesterner (as portrayed by a medicated and strapped down 16- year-old tragedy-to-be Judy Garland) this realization proves to be too much. Dorothy Gale wants nothing more than return to the arms of her cold fish Auntie Em and the homely but familiar womb of Kansas.
Whether or not she regrets the decision to give up her V.I.P. status return to the dusty status quo, and we never get to see. For many viewers, children and urbane adults in the 21st Century alike, the film’s allure lies in its promise of a place where the challenges are almost insurmountable, but the rewards just as outsize: camaraderie, promise, renown. If one is destined to find the lounge behind the velvet rope is filled with phonies, well, no one ever said that traveling alone via tornado to new worlds would be easy.
Unlike Dorothy, most of the 13 artists brought together for the “Nobody Gets to See the Wizard. Not Nobody. Not Nohow.” have chosen OZ over their own distant Kansases. The works here each recall some personal version of the epic fantasy.

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