Friday

• • Today
  • 

    6:30pm
  • 

    Clear 86°F

• Artists Aiden Simon, Amber Hawk Swanson, Oli Rodriguez and Sean Fader To read the full press release and view images, go tohttp://dennygallery.com/exhibitions/the-participants/. David Getsy will give a gallery talk about "The Participants" at Denny Gallery on Friday at 6:30 p.m. (talk will begin promptly at 7 p.m.). Excerpt from the Press Release: "Not content to accept the lives and limits given to them, these artists embed themselves in communities and social practices in order to re-create their pasts and their futures. They engage with these communities not as knowing observers or objective commentators but as earnest contributors. Their work takes the form of social media, photography, performance events, sculpture, and durational concepts, and it revolves around their dedication to opening their lives to new solidarities and populations. From the retracing of parental sex partners to re-imagined youthful memories to looking for love and authenticity online and in real time, these artists undertake practices that alter their lives and their social worlds. Rather than offering ironic critique or self-satisfied oppositionalism, the Participants risk making their lives porous with their art in order to remap their loves and their days. They search for ways to remake their own histories, to re-imagine their futures, and to establish sympathies in unexpected or disavowed locations. "Life and art, public and private, maker and subject — all become impossible distinctions. This work pollutes the making of art with the living out of fantasy, and it does not apologize for its ethical ambiguities, bittersweet pleasures, and leaps of faith. Sex (or its promise) is a major area of concern in these works, as each artist’s practice revolves around the needs and sympathies found in other bodies and different persons. The record of these lifeworks — some years in the making and living — are social media archives, photographs, sculptures, and urban legends. This exhibition brings together a range of objects produced in the course of these lifeworks — objects that mark the progress of social engagements and lives lived. "The artists in The Participants live out their desires as their art in order to gamble with who they are. They offer images of possibilities for remaking the past and inhabiting the future. They neither mock nor critique. Instead, they embrace, they risk, and they engage."

Denny Gallery

261 Broome Street, New York, New York 10002

View Map · Get Directions

Posts