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Indepth Arts News:
"Cut, Pulled, Colored and Burnt"
2002-08-26 until 2002-10-05
Hyde Park Art Center
Chicago, IL,
USA United States of America
The Hyde Park Art Center will open an exhibition titled Cut pulled colored & burnt. This exhibition features work that examines ways in which the popular culture of hair and beauty demonstrate attitudes of personal, social, and political empowerment. Curated by Michael Rooks of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the exhibition will bring work by internationally recognized artists to the Art Center to appear alongside work by emerging artists from Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.
Raising issues of representation, cultural identity and assertion through photography, painting, drawing, sculpture and assemblage, the exhibition offers a diverse group of provocative, serious works, tempered by often humorous social critique. Dawoud Bey’s closely observed images of young people in their own environment, Matthias Herrmanns irreverent pictures of himself in spicy drag, Lauren Kelley’s outlaw Afros and Santiago Sierra’s documentation of forced cultural conformity address these issues through modes of portrait, fashion, and documentary photography. Brett Cook-Dizney, Charles LaBelle and Rashid Johnson take different roads to the determination of racial and generational identity, while Conor McGrady invokes the authority of academic portraiture in a full-length painting that is darkly meditative and menacing. Anne Lemanski and Price-Walton focus on the complex and sometimes comic aspects of headgear – wigs and hats – and while Wolfgang Tillmans demands us to confront the unmentionable absence of hair that has been shaved away, Jerome Powers seduces the viewer with the unmentionable strands that should have been discarded. Stas Orlovski’s meticulous drawings of hair suggest fantastic and poetic landscapes, and Dana Schutz invents a bizarre portrait from unlikely combinations of physical attributes. Finally, Ellen Spiro’s documentary film shows how extraordinary people transform the social dynamism of a hair salon, effecting heroic action. Héctor Falcón and Georgina Valverde abstract culturally specific hairstyles, conveying their potency and expanding their meaning.
Cut pulled colored & burnt will engage new audiences, while activities and programs will make complex and conceptually challenging contemporary art accessible to a broader audience. At the opening reception on August 25, models will show styles created by Marianne Strokirk Salons. Closing the exhibition with a party on October 5, area cosmetology students will show their creativity and inspiration while top stylists are showcased in a photographic exhibition of the Alternative Hair Show’s “Rising Stars” award winners. Exuberant and celebratory, Cut pulled colored & burnt interrogates the intersection of art and fashion.
IMAGE:
Dawoud Bey
Hillary & Taro (II) 1992
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