Home Studio
SPRING/BREAK Art Show
Old School, 233 Mott Street, NYC
March 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th 2014 – Daily open hours from 12:00-8:00 PM
March 4th, VIP and Press Previews, 2:00-9:00 PM – RVSP Here.
Vanessa Albury
Ronnie Bass
Maria Louisa Calandra
Jesse Bransford
Scott Hug
Mileece
Juliet Jacobson
Alex Jovanovich
Keith Mayerson
Max Razdow
Shoplifter aka Hrafnhildur Arnardottir
Joshua Smith
curated by Kari Adelaide and Max Razdow
“Gilbert Jonas, the painter, believed in his star.” – Albert Camus, The Artist at Work
Home Studio proposes a space with simple borders: the works in Home Studio are all produced at home. Like Albert Camus’ 1957 text, The Artist at Work, this exhibition explores the distinction between art and life by questioning the division of the artist’s studio versus the home. Can the personal space of the home become an agent of creation rather than an adversary or mere subject? Can the harsh light of the studio be dimmed to moonlit walls, and there a greater project be served?
“‘What are you doing up there Jonas?’
‘I’m working.’
‘Without light?’
‘Yes, for the moment.'”
The artists’ wide range of practices in Home Studio operate in a way that both “production studio” and “post-studio” working modes may not, manifesting dimly lit tenets of the self. The ideal of art creation lingering in the current, particularly challenging economy in America has come to ambulate in a nascent vortex between two poles. On one extreme, we find working modes which mimic principles of commercial production, tending toward large scale or reproducible objects built upon or in the shadow of the workshop, employing strategies or aesthetics of fabrication. Opposing this is the ideal of the non-studio or post-studio practice, where we find a radical formlessness which is positioned as oppositional: relational aesthetics, performative absences, and art engaging in pure-found milieus. For Camus’ character, Jonas, themes of fellowship and emptiness operated with an anxious, binary gravity in his practice, one which he strove to reconcile.
Home Studio proposes and collects samples of a vital new axiom which reveals an abounding desire for an amplification of the artist’s agency through a sense of turning inward, away from the fluorescent light and toward belief in a “personal star,” potentially pulling away from the collective anchors of ambition. In escaping both the harsh-lit studio as a zone of production, as well as the flux of assumed truth we are left with outside, we may turn to a nuanced plane — the plane of the hearth, the plane of the home, or the space that the self lives in — one that is familiar, human and personal, yet finds ways to reach outward in scope, highlighting and widening the boundaries of a profoundly temporal and experiential space.
For more information, please contact The Sphinx at thesphinxnyc@gmail.com or SPRING/BREAK.
