Herring, who will be showing her videos, two of which will be projected in “isolation theaters” she builds — the floating black boxes function as individual viewing stations — also is overseeing promotion of the show and built the elegant website, www.galleryoneeleven.com. The exhibition was made possible by the donation of free gallery space by building owner Mike Piazza — a type of benefit that’s next to impossible in the Big Apple, though Gal said he would like to bring the show to Brooklyn eventually.
Herring organized two previous shows at the Shirt Factory, but this is the first exhibition curated by Gal and features the work of the Exchange. Judging by images of each artist’s work on the website, the exhibition will live up to its billing by Gal as an exploration and analysis of the “intangible and unfathomable aspects of capitalism.” He elaborated: “Capitalism is a form of anarchy, in which the hope of liberation is captive to mostly invisible market forces, which overshadow and determine every single human activity and interaction. When the 20-somethings look at the political, financial, and social upheaval that is taking place in the U.S. and around the world, they are trying to figure out what is their position in society.
“Given the barrage of images manufactured by media, the public is already hijacked. Artists have to figure out a way to work with audiences already mesmerized and indoctrinated. They need to create images that arrest its attention and expose the social amnesia and anesthesia that typifies this period. For contemporary artists, the challenge is to use images that elucidate how real lived experience has moved into the realm of representation.”
Disembodied chat and time’s transience
The artists have responded in inspired, multiple ways. Instead of cuts of meat, Warren Lewis packages dead animals, fur intact, in the standard plastic-wrapped yellow supermarket packages, with a tag stamped with the date, price per pound, and price. Lilly Gist, perhaps inspired by a scathing critique of the art world entitled The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, has constructed branding irons bearing the names of influential galleries. Shakhed Hadaya is two years into an eight-year project to create a machine showing the mechanics of language and will be exhibiting graphic “drawings for the engineer” in which pairs of pages are covered in spidery, multicolored script and sketches of machine parts.
Irish artist Conor McGrady, the one artist who didn’t study with Gal, draws and paints large black-and-white gouaches of British occupation sites, including neo-classical civic buildings and a classroom slashed in half by a black line. Brazil native Joana Fittipaldi will show a video that’s a response to chatroulette.com, a social webcam site that randomly connects users’ webcams, providing access to an often-intimate realm in which the person being watched is compelled to captivate the chance viewer, or be quickly dropped. Kasumi Iwama makes molds of exquisitely formed fragments of small figures, then casts them in ice and hangs the sculptures on a rope at room temperature, so that they slowly melt away, expressing the transience of time.
