ART GREENWICH INVITES FOWARD THINKING ART INSTALLATIONS
Eileen Braziel Art Advisors presents the mediums of installation and performance with a painterly twist, in the traveling exhibition, Pretty Tough: Gender in 21st-Century Artmaking). This fluid and site-specific exhibition changes in each of its various venues, with artists deriving their inspiration from re-contextualized Baroque, Rococo, and Romantic movements in art history. The term "neo-Romantic Barococo" was coined by art historian Kathryn M Davis to describe the aesthetic feel that developed out of the theme of gender identity as proposed by the exhibition title. Artworks presented at Art Greenwich will reference the Baroque and Rococo fantasy worlds of glamour, glitter, and glitz, and includes a strong spatial quality in which all objects are related to one another; while Maximalism incorporates old Romantic ideals of the Exotic Other. Everything from donuts to doilies is used to further these notions of the old revisited within contemporary art parameters.
The exhibition, curated by Braziel and Davis, begins its first round of travel at the Seafair in Greenwich. The artwork will reflect a style of pop-based extravagance in multi-media, new media, up-cycled and repurposed materials. Planned installations and performance are inspired by Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, well-known for its atmosphere of exuberant, thinly veiled eroticism. Caity Kennedy’s site-specific piece, Heart in the Forest II, will be created in concert with artist Matt King, who explores appropriation via a form of “tribal Maximalism,” or "urban hunting and gathering." Designer and artist Beth Olsen, known for her innovative creations of recycled furnishings, will install a cascading, LED-lit chandelier made of recycled plastic. Lucrecia Troncoso’s paper sculptures re-create the irony of Rococo style fabrics, and Will Wilson, inspired by his native land of Navajo Nation, will create a glass-bead, symbolic ladder amongst an all-over, visceral landscape. Julien McRoberts's massive clear-emulsion photographs printed on Plexiglas will flank the lounge entrance to the exhibition. McRoberts’s photographs are staged images of the exhibition artists, and are to be included in a book of essays about Pretty Tough. Lee Ann and David Lester will sponsor our special guest artist ARLOBI (Armando Lopez-Bircann), performing Friday evening. As the Baroque era celebrated the exhilaration and chiaroscuro of performance, so do ARLOBI's gender-bent, sculptural performances capture moments in the timeline of identity. He will use ceremony as a “metaphor of desire" to premiere his performance at the Seafair, captivating the audience with his interpretation of The Swing.
