TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
Curated by Rob Ventura, this exhibition brings together six contemporary artists upending everyday and pop-culture archetypes and imagery to create dynamic new works in video, photography, painting, and sculpture. In fact, the iconoclastic tendencies of these artists makes these categorizations of media joyously quite difficult.
Alexandra Rubinstein’s paintings are more subversive feminist-affermative T-shirt designs than paintings, and Marta Buda’s large poured foam sculptures, suggesting corrupted and aggressively expanding candy hearts, are paintings erupting from the walls as sculpture. Tobias Waite’s work also simultaneously exists as painting and sculpture, with immaculately painted patterns and images on corrugated material suggestive of architecture. Denise Treizman’s sculpture uses a diversity of materials mixing carefully-selected yet haphazard found objects with ceramics and other traditional media. It is clearly sculptural, and yet, forms part of a personal iconography that also involves performative acts and larger installations. This exhibition also features large works by Nick Fusaro that play with and undermine artistic standards by, for example, creating a large painting with a surface of polymer clay, or an oversized cardboard wedge humorously advertising with hand-painted text- something that isn’t really there. Video and photographic work by Sofia Szamosi contrasts with Rubinstein’s dry-witted attack on patriarchal structures by using a confrontational eroticism to achieve a similar goal. Via self-portrature, or perhaps more accurately, extended selfies, Szamosi gives and takes, smiles and frowns, and establishes an idolatry of self.
