“Ascension” Exhibition
ROX Gallery
This event has ended.
Curated by Founder & Director Emerald Fitzgerald
Ascension is rooted in a post-globalized contemporary relationship between East and West. From the east comes a meditative focus on externally driving forces, including industrial growth and mass commercialization. The west voices an aggressive determination to process internally, rooting the dialogue of self versus metropolis with an undeniably autobiographical expression.
Ascension provides a clear counterpoint to last month’s group show Delusions, where the fragmentation of ideology stemmed from a singular sense of self. Now, fragmentation abounds in multitudinous ‘selves’, highlighting large-scale interactions between national and, arguably, mystical realms.
Chen Jiagang inverts the Eastern aesthetic and Western figures –instead framing the identity of a minimized figure in an overpowering industrial void, both desolate and engaging. Based in Beijing, Jiagang provides a commentary on the changing face of contemporary China, personifying the urbanization of a diminishing human form.
The portrait of Dash Snow in the bathtub by Dave Schubert counterpoints Jiagang’s work. Snow (1981-2009) spent his fleeting youth drowning in an ephemeral, stylistic self-awareness, living in a former Chinatown brothel. Snow’s naked body submerged in a bathtub of Polaroids evidences utter Western excess.
Tattooing and ritual are recurring themes throughout Ascension. Tanatos Banionis, a Russian art collective, tattoos directly onto figures, employing the forms for video installation and photography. Although the group, their models, and techniques are deliberately anonymous in submission to aesthetic ideology as a secret clan, the introduction of the figure imbues the design with a visceral expression of self.
A staple artist at Rox, Spencer Tunick, expounds on the spiritual themes with a literal Dead Sea of 1,200 bodies, photographed on location. Decadent mirrors by Ultra Violet reflect these meditations.
ROX continues to expound on the concept of self-expression. From the documentation of self-love with Who Shot Natalie White? to the destruction of self with None of Us is Greater Than All of Us to the current conceptions of partial realities, the aesthetic and analytical journey into the dichotomy of globalized consciousness is revelatory.
[Image: Tanatos Banionis “Untitled II” (2008-2013), digital print on Barite paper, 90 × 120 cm. Unique edition]
Media
Schedule
from November 11, 2013 to December 14, 2013