“The facts we hate, we’ll never meet walking down the road, everybody yelling, ‘Hurry up, hurry up!’ But I’m waiting for you, I must go slow, I must not think bad thoughts. When is this world coming to? Both sides are right, but both sides murder, I give up, why can’t they?”

[/I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, X, 1983 /]

Upended by the November election results, the American political establishment has been turned on its head. Experiencing a polarizing social and political retrenchment not seen since the Civil War, people scream past each other, dispensing with discourse in favor of heated polemic that matches the rage or vindication that each side feels.

What felt like a shock to many on the coasts may have been motivated by retribution from those in America’s middle, squeezed by the twin challenges of a post-2008 recovery that eluded them and a vanishing demographic identity once referred to as the “middle class.” And yet what both now have in common is the loss of normalcy that the checks and balances of our two-party system was designed to provide.

While the constant upheavals of the new government reflect the instability that brought it into being, it’s worth considering whether its cataclysmic inception in the early hours of last November 9th should have been met with such surprise. The weakening hold with which the established parties have maintained order has been evident in numerous symptoms, though each one was often dismissed as a containable threat to the system as a whole.

Over the last several years, the spate of mass shootings, police violence, and growing homeless population are all reminiscent of the dark, recessionary past of the 1970’s, eventually dispensed with in the public’s imagination by the promise of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Reacting to a society that had had enough of “social problems”, our first TV president waved a magic wand and made them go away.

As media increasingly saturates day-to-day life, politics adopts its techniques, shaping reality to suit its goals. While it feels like a bad joke that a reality show entrepreneur now runs the country, it may be an indication that media’s once seamless management of unchecked pathologies inhabiting America’s psyche has reached its limit.

Years of suppressing underlying conflicts sublimated by media’s often-simplified narratives regarding loaded markers such as race and class now seem to be “leaking out.-” As positions harden in the midst of looking for answers, it’s tempting to seek comfort in an interiority that encloses one into known quarters, separate and apart from those presumed to be at fault for our plight.

In examining the American interior as a private, geographic, and psychic space, the interest in this exhibition is to encourage a kind of trespass into realms where our media narratives have failed to tread; an attempt to move forward by looking back at concerns that may have been ignored at our peril.

 

Installation View

Photo credit: Nicholas Knight

Installation View

Photo credit: Nicholas Knight

Installation View

Photo credit: Nicholas Knight

Installation View

Photo credit: Nicholas Knight

Installation View

Photo credit: Nicholas Knight

Installation View

Photo credit: Nicholas Knight

Installation View

Photo credit: Nicholas Knight

Richard Artschwager

t,w,m,d,r,b, 2003, etching, 18"x 20" each, Courtesy of Harlan and Weaver

David Baskin

UTICA, 1998-2017
Super 8 film transfer to video format 11" x 14"

Lawrence Berzon

Escapist, 2003
Oil on linen
56 x 89 cm / 22" x 35"

Julien Bismuth

Top: Untitled (cloaks 4), 2012 Collage, acrylic
13 3/8" x 13 3/4"
Bottom: Untitled (cloaks 6), 2012 Collage, acrylic
14 1/4" x 13"
Courtesy of the artist and The Box

Richard Bosman

Civil War Tent, 2005
Oil on canvas
137 x 152 cm / 54" x 60"

Barbara Ess

No title (snake in living room), 2017 Archival inkjet print
46 x 61 cm / 18" x 24"

Terence Gower

Kitchen I & II, 2004
Two piezo pigment prints on Hahnemühle photo rag 56 x 43 cm / 22" x 17" each

Dorothea Lange

Japanese relocation, California. Ester Naite, an office worker from Los Angeles, is shown operating an electric iron in her quarters at Manzanar, California, a War Relocation Authority center where evacuees of Japanese ancestry will spend the duration. Miss Naito works in an office at the center, 1942/2017, Photographic prints
26 x 34 cm / 10 1/4" x 13 1/4"

Louise Lawler

Tungsten, 2008-2009
Cibachrome, 45 1/4" x 25"

Sherrie Levine

Untitled (President Series), circa 1975 Photograph
14 x 9 cm / 5.5" x 3.5"

Paul McCarthy

Plaster Your Head and One Arm into a Wall, 1973/2005 Cibachrome photograph, 2 parts
67 x 47 cm / 26 3/8" x 18 1/2" each, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth

Bill Owens

Photo 09, circa 1970s Photograph print
20 x 25 cm / 8" x 10"

Bill Owens

Togetherness really exists in our family, from the series Suburbia, 1971/1998 gelatin silver print
40 x 48 cm / 15 3/4" x 18 3/4" framed

Bill Owens

Untitled (Nixon on TV), from the series Suburbia, 1972/1998 gelatin silver print
39 x 48 cm / 15 1/4" x 19" framed

Bill Owens

Untitled (Empty Room with TV and Two Chairs), from the series Suburbia, 1971/2008 gelatin silver print
39 x 46 cm / 15 1/4" x 18" framed

Gordon Parks

Willie Causey Jr. with Shotgun During Alabama Violence, 1956 Ilforchrome print
51 x 41 cm / 20" x 16", Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery

Heidi Schlatter

Hearth #2 ("The Birds"), 2012 Archival ink on honeycomb aluminum 112 x 122 cm / 44" x 48"

Claudia Sohrens

Aufheben, 2009-2010
Series of Archival Pigment Prints
61 x 160 cm / 24" x 63" & 20 x 25 cm / 8" x10"

Steel Stillman

TV, 2017
Archival pigment print, edition 1/5 57 x 48 cm / 22 1/2" x 18 3/4"