“baseball show” Exhibition

TSA

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Tiger Strikes Asteroid NYpresents its upcoming exhibition, baseball show. Curated by Andrew Prayzner and featuring Christopher Gideon, Brighid Greene, Sharon Horvath, Ryan Johnson, Elias Necol Mead, Mark Mulroney, Catalina Schliebener, and Ghost of a Dream, baseball show looks at the game as a metaphorical framework that allows artists to examine gender identity, racial inequality, and how rules and architectural structures affect human behavior.

While baseball’s visual language easily evokes nostalgia, the artists in the exhibition carefully navigate around facile representation while engaging with the sport in material way to self reflect, and consider humanistic discourse.

“What is it about the game of baseball that intrigues me? It feels antiquated and conservative compared to other sports. Its politics certainly do not mirror mine, yet I love it so.

It occupies space and time like no other sport. It unfurls itself over the radio airwaves for better part of a whole year’s time in my studio space while I paint alone. The droning play-by-play, fatuous advertisements, and the occasional electrifying moment of a homerun call complement the slow heat of summer days.

The game fragments into singular moments. Season divides into games that divide into innings that divide into outs that divide into pitches. The lone batter faces the pitcher and his defenders. One outfielder stands alone in the afternoon shadows kicking at upended turf. Each moment is quantified in a sea of statistics. The mythology is taut and echoes the lone artist in their studio, a singular entity pressing against time and history.

The structure of the game is easy to visualize in the mind while listening on the radio or following with an app. The architecture around the game is unique to the sport, and can have a deliberate effect on the score. In Vanalyne Green’s essay, Mother Baseball, she describes the stadium and diamond as feminist symbols, a “circle and a Y” (she writes that if men say baseball is emblematic of America, then why can’t it also be a “pagan spectacle about the cycles of life and death”). All players want to come home and be safe.

The image above is St. Louis Cardinals outfielder, Lou Brock, who fatefully did not slide on a play coming home against the Detroit Tigers in the 1968 World Series. It was a turning point that shifted from the Cardinals, who were ahead in the series, to the eventual victors, the Tigers.

It is a resource image that is in the collection of Sharon Horvath, who explained during a studio visit, that her interest in the moment is it being a split decision that changed Brock’s life. It changed history. The Cardinals lost that game, and then lose another game due to an error by Brock’s teammate, Curt Flood. The Cardinals lose the series, and their owner blames Flood, trading him to the Phillies, who were a notoriously racist club. Flood refuses to be traded and sues the league. The subsequent lawsuits bring about the free agency of players in baseball and the game is changed forever.” –Andrew Prayzner