Press Release
PRESS
RELEASE: MIND YOUR FIGURE
Coolture
Showroom, 409 West 39th Street
June 24 – June 27, 2010
Opening reception June 23, 6-9 pm
June 7, 2010, New York - Aniko Berman and Suzana Diamond (collectively known as DB Projects) are pleased to present Mind Your Figure, a group exhibition featuring eight young, New York-based artists working in a variety of media. The show, which includes the work of Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Kate Gilmore, Megan Hays, M.A.Y.O, Ben Olson, Brian Reed, and Christopher Sachs, will be open to the public from June 24 until June 27, 2010.
Mind Your Figure is the product of the collaborative efforts of Aniko Berman and Suzana Diamond who are progressively paving a professional path for themselves through the contemporary art world. They recently chose to engage in a curatorial partnership, and have since dedicated the past months to the independent organization of this exhibition, while also devoting themselves to their separate professional art world roles.
Mind Your Figure intends to create a special platform where different artistic sentiments and aesthetic approaches can flourish in an enriching dialogue that contemplates the notion of figuration in contemporary art. As an exploration of the traditional notion of the human figure, Mind Your Figure seeks to locate this age-old trope of visual art in the contemporary sphere, and thus to re-evaluate its meaning and relevance in the twenty-first century. As the profound emblem of the human condition – the transcendental symbol of the conscious experience that binds us all – the human figure has pervaded artistic practice since Lascaux, and has effectively withstood the non-objective and abstracting wave of high modernism, maintaining a firm grip on the minds of artists and viewers alike.
The artists in the exhibition explore this visual and conceptual notion in diverse manners. In some works, the figure can be subject or object, and often, both. Gilmore and Cerqueira Leite literally utilize their own bodies in their video and sculpture work; the artist is certainly present, and yet, she remains uneasily anonymous. These artists’ works also provide different visions of sculpture, one reductive, the other additive, thereby challenging and questioning art historical visions of sculpture and the nature of the medium today. Importantly, these works also call into question the boundaries between the self-portrait and the autonomous self, a relationship that is further explored in Olson’s large-scale paintings. Indeed, his emotive self-portraits are pungent with pathos, alluding to the angst-filled charms of early expressionism. Seen next to Gilmore and Cerqueira Leite, however, Olson’s works evoke the notion of self-construction, revealing an ambiguous sense of self-objectification; the viewer’s gaze penetrates with a piercing stare.
The sense of uncertainty proffered by these art objects can also be seen in the sculptures of Hays, the video work of M.A.Y.O, the photography of Sachs, and the paintings of Yoo. Indeed, these works all present themes of decadence, artificiality, and the ambiguous realm between modern life and death. Hays’ sculptures inject an unsettling sense of vitality into the physical fabric of industry, confronting the viewer with a foreign, uncanny life form that hovers between the organic and the man-made, the human and the alien. M.A.Y.O.’s hyper-polished cinematic narrative subjects an Iphigenia-like maiden to the teleological outcome of modern existence, presenting her sickeningly beautiful demise amidst the ephemera of artificial life. Sachs’ photographs illustrate the uncanny jolt between the beautiful and the damned, providing an insightful investigation into the perils of aesthetic expectation. The female figure, as graphic vessel of sexual allure, becomes unsettlingly decorative and overtly eroticized when viewed next to the over-ripe loveliness of botanical and piscine symbols of life and death. Finally, Yoo’s lush painting provides suggestive dystopian visions, whose precise shape cannot be read, but whose general forms are grimly legible as fearful, and yet inviting, fragments of human life. The ensuing oscillation between abstraction and figuration, between the foreign and the familiar, lends her work an active aesthetic and conceptual complexity.
As a complementary alternative to the poetic malaise evoked by these works, Reed’s installation and performance work uses a universal sense of ritualized spirituality to celebrate and honor humanity. His nkisi staffs physically co-identify with the upright human figure, further engaging the viewer with their meaningful, powerful mysticism. By prompting us to look back to ancient, “primitive” rites, Reed effectively looks forward to the possibility of a modern human utopia, one where mind, body, and earth return together.
Artistic interest in the human figure is certainly not new, and this rich, expansive, and universal legacy only adds to its significance at this historical moment, where modernity has shaped a world of colossal and enigmatic cultural, social, and political proportions, the exact dimensions of which this generation is still attempting to comprehend. In this way, Mind Your Figure presents a discrete selection of works that grapple aesthetically with such existential questions, and which provide a worthy, insightful view of human life today, and perhaps the origin of a new vision for tomorrow.
