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Six
Layers of Hell Friday July 23rd through Sunday
July 25th Six Layers of Hell is a group exhibition featuring six emerging artists living and working in New York City. It is the visual arts component of The Hell Festival, which integrates theater, dance, music, and contemporary art, held at The Brick theater space. The festival was conceived of as a platform for artists to engage with the concept of “Hell” via religious, existential, absurdist, or playful means. Each artist in the exhibition creates unique personal and political narratives through a multitude of sources including biblical stories, mythology, comic books, and contemporary film and video. They mine these references to create intimate tableaux generating feelings of horror, ecstasy, and humor. This collection of artwork, with undertones of theatricality and performance, are especially suited for The Brick—a space grounded in the performing arts. Amie Cunningham’s installation, Ritual, evokes the seductive pulse of violence recurring in pop cultural forms. Included in the installation is a video projection that’s use of blunt gore, inter-titles, color saturation, and jump cutting references Godard’s Weekend (1968). The video is accompanied by sculptural and painted props that are fabricated in a purposefully synthetic and artificial manner. This supplies the installation with an ultimately campy, humorous quality. In its entirety, the installation both alienates and captivates the audience within its merciless other-world. Brian Dewan incorporates storytelling, music, and drawing to investigate the lesser-known stories of St. Francis of Assisi. His work in the exhibition will explore hell as a “fiery furnace” and also as a locus of dissolution. He will have periodic performances throughout the course of the exhibition in the form of storytelling and singing. Drawings inspired by the stories will also be on view. Brian Dewan has previously exhibited at Pierogi, a Brooklyn gallery. Jesse Kaufmann’s addresses physicality, experience, memory, and emptiness. One of two pieces included in the exhibition is a drawing composed of dense, spontaneous pen marks, which give shape to a circular, central void of untouched paper. Also included is a spiral, wrought-iron bookcase layered with 27 time-worn sketchbooks. The artist has been carrying a sketchbook in his back pocket every day for the past nine years. Among the pages of these books are self-portraits, figure studies, landscapes, notes on art materials and methods, scientific equations, cooking recipes and handwritten text. Kaumfmann’s choice of media--coffee grounds, flower petals, wine, collage, etc.--indicates how intimately his sketchbooks are bound to his everyday life. These works posit a dialogue between differing notions of existentialism and metaphysical reason. Multimedia artist Johnerick Lawson will exhibit a politically charged moster installation. A single suitcase opens to reveal a talking George W. Bush doll taken hostage by red, white, and blue playdough monsters with protruding genitals. The installation is steeped in the anxiety of war, torture, and election year politics. Viewers are invited to “touch the Bush dolls button for a stomic ake” and a container of yellow playdough pleads “make the rest of us.” Lawson is one of the co-founders of the Brooklyn artist collective, WAMP (Working Artists’ Meeting Point) and his work is exhibited frequently in New York and San Francisco. Troy Swain creates work that plays with the interstices of consumer and literary cultural references. His installation for the show consists of two three-dimensional drawings based on Hieronymus Bosch, Godzilla movies, the Wall Street Journal , and the Book of Revelations. Swain has exhibited at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica, Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, in Orange, California, Plattformelf in Zurich, Switzerland, and Southfirst here in Brooklyn. Painter Sherry Wong utilizes a blend of literary, historical, mythological and allegorical sources to create “hero” paintings in which she plays the leading role. She “sublimates the occurrences of her life to construct her own fledgling epic story of love, lust, betrayal, religion, and suffering.” Derived from Islamic book illustrations and miniatures, the artists’ technique is uniquely suited for storytelling. By placing herself in well know narratives, the artist deftly probes issues of identity, fantasy, and autonomy. Her work in the exhibition is part of a series derived from Dante’s Inferno. Wong has previously exhibited at Feigen Contemporary and I-20. Hours: |