AS NIGHT STROLLED OVER TO SEE WHAT'S UP
May 6 - 28, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, May 9th 6 - 8 pm
Curated by Nora Rodriguez
Exhibiting Artists: Glen Baldridge, Robin Cameron, Eve Fowler, Michael Krueger, Phyllis Ma, and Chris Thorson
Phyllis Ma
Untitled (Underwear), 2013
36" x 120"
fabric, acrylic paint
Image Courtesy of the artist
As Night features the work of six artists who engage the countless duplicate, lending strangeness to everyday objects. In magazines, metro cards, and tuna cans we are reminded of the print's ability to replicate imagery quickly and cheaply. Artists working in print adopt a medium with the potential for nearly infinite reproduction. And then they make ten. Or three. Or one. Fine art printmaking holds within it a peculiar tension: the technology of mass-production mobilized for limited edition. The works on view explore the tools and texture of commercial printing, adopting strategies so familiar, we may even forget that they are prints. The works generate a conversation between handmade and mechanized, rarefied and endlessly reproducible, ubiquitous and unique.
The show takes its title from the final line of Charles Simic's The Lunatic. The poem hinges on a familiar contradiction: a unique snowflake looped infinitely. What was singular becomes the storm, becomes the winter, becomes the weather. Like Simic's snowflake, the works on view unearth a potential for poetry and memory rooted in the vernacular of print. Though singular, these works gain new meaning as they join the storm.
The Lunatic
By Charles Simic
The same snowflake
kept falling out of the gray sky
all afternoon,
falling and falling
and picking itself up off the ground,
to fall again,
but now more surreptitiously,
more carefully
as night strolled over
to see what’s up.
PHOTOS FROM OPENING NIGHT!
