Art News:
FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Andrew Suggs
215-238-1236
director@voxpopuligallery.org
High-resolution
images are available upon request.
KICK
IN THE EYE
Curated
by Andrew Suggs
Vox
Populi, Philadelphia
April
1 – May 1, 2011
Opening
April 1 from 6 to 11 pm
Gallery talk with Andrew Suggs: Friday, April 15 at 6 pm
Graham
Durward, Alexandra Gorczynski, Stephen Irwin, Paul Lee,
Lovett/Codagnone,
Franklin Preston, Matthew Savitsky, Marc Swanson,
Scott Treleaven, Nicola Tyson
Nico:
Do you find there’s a similarity between us?
Randy: Uh, not
really, no.
Nico: No?
Randy: No, your hair is much longer than
mine.
Nico: Not really.
[From Andy Warhol's The
Closet]
Kick
in the Eye
is a group exhibition of recent painting, drawing, sculpture,
installation, photography and video that features artists who engage
fractured ways of looking and being seen. Through sideways glances,
misidentification, and quiet confrontation, these artists create
queer portraits, broken mirrors that deny easy absorption of
difference and call into question what we might think we know about
processes of identification. What can be activated in a viewer
through deliberate masking, hiding, coding, covering, or abstracting?
These
artists illustrate the fact that leisured looking is a position of
power and posit instead that the slippery back-and-forth of
identification resulting from looking made difficult may be a
subversive and generative act. In his introduction to Homos,
Leo Bersani calls for “an anticommunal mode of connectedness we
might all share, or a new way of coming together,” which “should
be the goal of any adventure in bringing out, and celebrating, 'the
homo' in all of us.” The works set up the possibility for a form
of connection and identification that relies on elusiveness, and
comes from solitary practices like painting and home-based video
production. They represent a queer sensibility, as Douglas Crimp has
put it, "not based on the model of the couple, the
two-coming-together-as-one, the you-and-me-against-the-world model."
As viewers we enter aware of our non-participation; we see otherness,
we confront strangeness, and we see ourselves.
Nicola
Tyson's
large-scale, colorful paintings are at once elegantly beautiful and
grotesque, psychological portraits of the unconscious and
manipulations of bodily form. Graham
Durward
presents a series of new paintings that are based on found
photographs of men cruising the Internet or of burning incense. They
are simultaneously analytic and poetic and express solitude and
desire through implied connection. Franklin
Preston
calls his paintings portraits of the psyche; they employ minimal,
layered elements to suggest stages of psychic isolation. Stephen
Irwin
is represented by a series of vintage porn magazine pages, which he
manipulated by rubbing parts of the image away, leaving a more
suggestive and expansive erotic landscape.
Paul
Lee
and Alexandra
Gorczynski's
video works use hand-made techniques to explore the self-construction
of identities through relationality. Scott
Treleaven's
Last
7 Words
is a quiet video portrait of pandrogynous artist Genesis Breyer
P-Orridge, and his intimate portal photographs illustrate a blurred
sense of longing while looking.
Matthew
Savitsky's
sculptural installation represents an absent body in play with the
viewer, making reference to sex and obsession. Marc
Swanson's
drawings literalize the complexities of exchanged glances, and his
sculptural/photo work recalls a cinematic space of desire and
identification. Artist duo Lovett/Codagnone,
through their performance on opening night and resulting sound piece
and installation, question ideas of coupling and explore the
dissolution and/or fusing of individual egos.
An
associated film screening will take place on April 8 and 9 at the
Ibrahim Theater at International House. Programs begin at 7 pm.
April
8 The
Closet,
Andy Warhol (1966, 66 minutes)
Blue,
Derek Jarman (1993, 79 minutes)
April
9 Bijou,
Wakefield
Poole (1972, 77 minutes)
Community
Action Center,
A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner (2010, 69 minutes)
In
addition to the works on view and film screenings, a discussion space
designed by artist Matthew
Savitsky
will be activated throughout the course of the exhibition by a series
of intimate talks on related themes. A schedule will be posted on
the Vox Populi web site. When not in use for discussions, the space
will function as a research/reading room with materials available for
perusal chosen by the curator and the participating artists.
Andrew
Suggs is a curator, writer and artist based in Philadelphia. He
curated Expanded
Marks at
Space (Portland, ME) in 2009 and an upcoming show at ArtHouse
(Austin, TX). He has contributed texts to Phonebook:
A
Directory of Alternative Spaces (2009)
and Queer
Voice
(ICA Philadelphia catalog, 2010). Suggs is the Executive Director of
Vox Populi, a Philadelphia artists' collective. He earned an AB cum
laude from Harvard University.
Kick
in the Eye has
been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the
Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative and the William Penn Foundation.
Vox Populi's programs are possible through the generous support of
individual contributors, our audience and Board of Directors, and the
following funders: Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Pennsylvania Council
on the Arts, Samuel P. Mandell Foundation, Samuel S. Fels Fund,
Dolfinger McMahon Foundation, The Barra Foundation, John S. and James
L. Knight Foundation, Scion, and Google.
Image:
Nicola Tyson, Bearded
Artist,
2005; Oil and charcoal on linen, 58 x 48 inches
Courtesy of
Friedrich Petzel Gallery
VOX
POPULI
319 N 11th Street, Third Floor, Philadelphia, PA
19107
215-238-1236 • 215-238-1253 fax •
www.voxpopuligallery.org
• exhibitions@voxpopuligallery.org