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A group exhibition of twenty California-based artists whose works share traits of the uncanny, mysterious, and the gothic that explores the dark underside of American culture. Drawings, paintings, sculpture, photo-based work and installations allude to horror, to biology gone wrong, to dark forces, to conspiracy, to madness, to monsters, to disease, to being afraid to fall asleep, to anxiety over losing control, to bumping into one’s own secret fears in hidden rooms and behind locked doors, to decay and decomposition, to an afterlife that brings us back to this life and to nothing beyond, and finally to shadowy, strange, wicked and perverse bodies.
The exhibition focuses on the body as a site where the personal and the public domains intersect. It is a return to a subject matter that was explored by artists in the late 1980s and early 1990s during changing cultural times, exemplified by the rise in the AIDS epidemic and the culture wars sparked by the NEA controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe’s and Andre Serrano’s artwork. Today, the cultural atmosphere reflects some of the same chilling effects. The title plays off artist Grant Wood’s 1930 painting, American Gothic, which has come to symbolize down-home, small-town conservative values. It has become a talisman to protect the American way of life against a chaotic outer world. The artists in the exhibiton are: Jane Callister, Clayton Campbell, Jennifer Celio, Lee Clarke, Brian Cooper, David Early, Sherié Franssen, Michael Hanson, Laurie Hassold, Joseph Kearby, Jeff Koegel, Adam Mars, Thomas McGovern, Rebecca Niederlander, Naida Osline, Jim Ovelmen, Victoria Reynolds, Clayton Spada, Lisa Tucker, Yasuko Guest curated by Tyler Stallings, chief curator at Laguna Art Museum. Artist Lectures Gallery C |
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| review from Rarified Air | ||||||