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Curator's Statement
Introduction
Last and Universal: the Semantics of Judgment
Thought Through Images
Seduced by Freedom of Thought
Art in the Age of Short-Term Memory
A Call to Artists and Audience
Seventeen Modern Tales
Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Seventeen Modern Tales, pt. 2
From
different perspectives and with diverse artistic approaches, the works of
Mike Combs, Pam Keeley and the duo Ted Grudowski & Adrienne Taggart examine
the opposition between multitude and individual.
Tension
is an essential component of Mike
Combs’s sculptures. It arises from the interplay between
two conflicting cultural elements, mass and dynamism.
Not In My Town, a 700-pound, twelve-feet-tall,
precariously balanced, monumental sculpture of steel and concrete, reflects
the complexity of the relationship between collective and individual like
a mirror. The sculpture is one and many at the same time, each single
element sublimated in a harmonic interaction to create a stronger unity
and identity. The precariousness of the piece poetically resolves the
opposition between many and one, inviting us to consider the consequences
of any prejudicial and judgmental behavior, and giving material expression
to the risk of exclusion--the entire community’s collapse.
The Last Judgment II by Pam
Keeley articulates the opposition between the multitude and
the individual on the two panels of a diptych. It has an inescapable,
gravitational quality. From a distance, the ash-gray palette coagulates
on the canvas in an apparently random distribution of isolated clots over
a neutral background. But up close, one discovers that each of the clots
is populated with figures, which float and sink in the amniotic, dimensionless
space around them.
The Last Judgment II defines an ethical space
through its very form. If you stand closer to the left panel, you get
caught up in its microcosm of humanity, made of unfinished bodies, agglomerated
archipelagos of heads, clusters of torsos, disturbing metamorphoses of
the flesh, and mask-like faces that recall those in paintings by James
Ensor. From that position and looking at the lone figure in the center
of the right panel, you will be part of the multitude, judging or witnessing
the judgment. On the other hand, approaching the right panel, you will
find yourself under judgment, submitting along with the lone figure to
the stares of the thousands of eyes to the left. Unlike traditional representations,
there is no hierarchy of judgment here, only a dialectic. Far from being
a proxy judge or authority, Keeley expresses her need to be there, inside
life, among the people.
