Curated by Joseph Imhauser and Victor Celaya
September 28 – October 28, 2017
Postcards from America: X-rays from Hell, a 1989 text written by the American artist David Wojnarowicz, presents to its reader a sense that the words and stories being shared, those of the early days of HIV/AIDS in the New York queer community, carry with them a narrative of bravery and homage for those who laid everything bare in the face of adversity. In this exhibition, the works also bear witness to heinous, senseless acts of institutionalized violence and racism in a cross-toxic mess that as of yet, has no end in site. The messages shared in the works of Lee Lozano, Josh Reames, Nina Chanel Abney, Mathew Zefeldt, Dave Mckenzie and Sofi Brazzealare more important now than ever in the face of rising fascist tendencies that have led America into a democratic and societal crisis.
Paintings, signs, drawings, the written word, they are all used for the same purpose: to depict an image of contemporary American life. Through language and semiotics, figurative repetition, and the use of modern-day hieroglyphs, the message is one: a society bombarded by an overflow of information that shatters the oppressed at the expense of the powerful.
Lozano’s “word piece” generates a manifesto of personal politics that are inevitably shared with and absorbed by the viewer, the same way Mckenzie’s banner resembles a meme whose somber mantra shows a stark boundary between realities. Zefeldt’s multiplication of imagery supports this idea. Through a much more representational perspective of pop culture and video games, he creates marks that solidify into still-life arrangements, a mental funnel that simulates the digital era we inhabit. Nina Chanel Abney engages controversial issues using representation and abstraction with the immediacy of a refreshed website or Twitter feed. Josh Reames’ paintings are a superimposed dialogue of streams of information pertaining to our social everyday struggles. Sofi Brazzeal confronts the smugness and fetishism of oppression and cruelty and channels it back to paper, an alchemy of how patriarchal dominance is visualized as a norm.
Through their individual language, – in unison – Postcards from America reveals the desire for social interconnectedness along with the somber truth that the fetishization of a Great America has seared itself into the fabric of the country.
With Love,
Joseph Imhauser & Victor Celaya
Lee Lozano
New Jersey, USA 1930–1999
Lee Lozano was a renown Conceptual artist and painter of the 20th century, associated with Minimalism and Expressionism at different times in her career.
Josh Reames’s
Dallas, USA, 1985
Josh Reames paintings use contemporary tools available on the Internet to create surreal patchworks of contemporary signs and symbols that portray the flattening of artistic hierarchies in our post-modern world.
Nina Chanel Abney
Chicago, USA, 1982
Nina Chanel Abney’s pieces address pop culture and racial conflicts, informed as much by hip-hop culture, animated cartoons, as by celebrity websites and tabloid magazines.
Mathew Zefeldt
Antioch, USA, 1987
Mathew Zefeldt is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Minnesota. Zefeldt received his BA in Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2009, and his MFA at the University of California, Davis in 2011. He was one of two national recipients of the Dedalus MFA Fellowship in 2011 and was included in New American Paintings #91, #97, #107 and #125.
Dave Mckenzie
Kingston, Jamaica, 1977
Using video performance and text Dave McKenzie explores how and why subjects engage – with and become-with one another. McKenzie was born in Kingston, Jamaica and received a BFA in printmaking from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.
Sofi Brazzeal
Washington, USA, 1984
Sofi Brazzeal lives and works in New York. Brazzeal received an MFA from NYU Steinhardt.