NEITHER SWORDS NOR PLOWSHARES
Exhibition Dates: September 13, 2010 – October 14, 2010
Opening Reception: Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 5-8 PM
NEITHER SWORDS NOR PLOWSHARES
FUNCTIONAL FUTILITIES
The fourteen contemporary artists participating in NEITHER SWORDS NOR PLOWSHARES bare witness, through their work, to the fluid boundaries between matter and signification, offering up a fragmentary glimpse into the surplus of potentialities extent within the ‘use-objects’ that they themselves use as base-materials and/or discursive signifiers. While the exhibition as a whole deconstructs the famous war-to-peace transformational dichotomy (i.e. “beat your swords into plowshares”), the individual works are even more ambitious, seeking, in one way or another, to exist in the viewer’s mind as both utility and futility. Some of the works are fabricated - through processes of removal, addition, or assemblage - from actual tools or weapons, and thereby aesthetically manipulated and/or contextually reframed for purposes other than their 'original' function. Other pieces have been constructed out of alternative materials to simulate, or even function as, actual tools or weapons. But, whether crafted or refashioned, each work exists, paradoxically inside and outside a node of that proverbial sword/plowshare binary, as a functional futility.
Exhibiting Artists: Michael Arcega, Koh Byoung-ok, Joshua Callaghan, Michael DeLucia, Al Farrow, Diego J Garza, Mary Beth Heffernan, Cal Lane, Robert Lazzarini, Matthias Merkel Hess, Camilo Ontiveros, Chad Person, Christopher Tallon, and Alison Walker
in the North Gallery
Simultaneous Inversions
Mirror Stage Shadow Stage
A tightly arranged three-person show in the small north gallery, Simultaneous Inversions takes as its starting point the concept of tonally inverted reflections, playing upon the gestalt of the mutually defining phenomena of light and shadow. The works presented probe that fine line between an absent presence and a present absence, delving into issues as seemingly unrelated as the process of photographic reproduction, familial/national (dis)connections, Lacanian subject formation, and memento mori. Jenny Yurshansky’s theatrical installation piece literally sets the stage for this dialogue, offering a spot lit space for the viewer to gaze hopelessly into a semi-reflective portal. Anthony Goicolea’s contributions confront his own sense of dislocation from a family cohesion distant in both time and space, recreating old photographic portraits by hand, but in negative, of his parents from their childhood in Cuba. Ashley V Blalock’s shadow portraits also translate photographic images, firstly in crocheted textile panels, and secondly by using those panels to project the inversions of these diaphanous bodies on the gallery wall, becoming a living camera obscura.
Exhibiting Artists: Ashley V Blalock, Anthony Goicolea, and Jenny Yurshansky
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