“Space is the Place” Exhibition
BravinLee Programs
This event has ended.
“Every man’s memory is his private literature.”
- Aldous Huxley
BravinLee programs presents Space is The Place, a group exhibition including Jeffrey Beebe, Fred Tomaselli, Chris McCaw, Amy Wilson, Steven Charles and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein.
Space is The Place is a metaphoric response to the curator’s formative years, when a life-long preoccupation with mind-extending art, music, literature, and psychedelia took shape. Regulating one’s state of consciousness took on the significance of religion for a mid-1970’s cadre of privileged, post-hippy, misfit teenagers with nothing in particular to rebel against. The exhibition’s title is taken from the1974 sci-fi film Space is The Place, written by Sun Ra, the afro-futurist pioneering bandleader musician and composer. Sun Ra and his Arkestra concerts helped fertilize the quest for euphoria, and inspired an appreciation for the absurd.
Jeffrey Beebe’s City of Psychopaths, is a large scale road-map urban elevation drawing. Beebe says, “Over the last fifteen years, I have created the world of Refractoria, a comprehensive imagino-ordinary world that is equal parts autobiography and pure fantasy.”
Chris McCaw’s one-of a-kind photographs record the direct evidence of the moon’s trajectory arcing through the sky. The landscape and light beam are recorded directly on to unexposed photographic paper. McCaw’s still images of space and time wed the chemistry of photography to the physics of nature.
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s swirly 1957 finger painting on masonite, represents a verdant thriving habitat alive with antennaed creatures that suggest alien space creatures, a teeming ocean reef or the microscopic world of dust-mites.
In somewhat the same vein as Von Bruenchenhein, Steven Charles’ meticulously painted surfaces visualize the journey through the fundamental macro-micro paradox. With mesmerizing detail, Charles work renders the wow of perception through an intricate matrix of lines, colors, motifs and textures.
Prior to making his reputation as a painter, Fred Tomaselli made sculpture and installation. Tomaselli worked on Booth for Isolation and Romance sporadically from 1989 to 1995 and it is the last sculpture he ever made. It is a portal, a cosmic theme-park like mental massage chamber, transporting the user(s) to a contemplative manufactured blissful meta-reality and contains the DNA of his entire artistic career.
Amy Wilson’s floating, walk-in sculpture, entitled Soft MOMA is a scale-model version of the museum. It presents an exhibition inside its walls that refutes the bigger-is-better mentality of the contemporary art world, by proposing a more humble and sincere alternative through images and text. The memory of museum visits is a crucial factor in the curator’s personal trajectory landing him into the cockamamie art world. No one put a gun to his head.
Space is The Place soundtrack by Christopher Koenigsberg
[Image: Steven Charles “thhipahapo” 63 x 65, acrylic and wood on canvas]
Media
Schedule
from January 09, 2014 to February 08, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-01-09 from 18:00 to 20:00